Born in Nice in 1975, Yosef Joseph Yaakov Dadoune has lived between the South of France and Ofakim, a development town in the Negev bordering Gaza. This double culture, his sense of being both from here and elsewhere, and of belonging to the periphery, feeds a body of work combining performances, films, choreography, photographs, drawings and paintings.

Invited to the mahJ, Joseph Dadoune takes over the contemporary gallery, the duke's bedroom and the library. He has chosen topresentworks that are more than fifteen years apart, a way of underlining the fundamentals thatunderpinhis work.

In the Duke's room, he projects, Sion a film shot in black and white at the Louvre in 2006. Actress Ronit Elkabetz plays a woman from the desert, dressed all in black, who wanders alone from the Egyptian halls to the sculpted decor of Korsabad, to the French paintings of the 19th century. Crossing time and civilizations, she personifies Jewish destiny and wandering.

The contemporary gallery showcases the most recent works. These are large charcoal drawings of uprootedflowers (2022), inspired byplantsthat grow almost without water at the edge of the desert, such as palms, thistles and asphodels. For the artist, his flowers "They lament and embody battered women, women damaged by their fate. Who hears them? The wind responds to their despair with a breath of life. The savagery of these black flowers is matched by the darkness of a humanity at war. The flowers fight and resist. They remain standing.

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