The director of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art has described how war and boycotts have reshaped her institution, while arguing that museums should stay open to debate rather than be punished for their national identity. In a wide-ranging interview, Tania Coen-Uzzielli said October 7, 2023, changed the professional reality for everyone at the museum.

On that day the museum was showing a Giacometti exhibition, borrowed from the Fondation Giacometti in Paris and funded by Eyal Ofer, which had been due to close the next day. With rockets striking Tel Aviv, staff rushed valuable loans into secure storage. In the weeks that followed, Hostages Square took shape outside the museum's doors, and the institution opened its spaces for art therapy and community gatherings, discovering what Coen-Uzzielli calls a civic role beyond presenting exhibitions.

The boycott campaign has had practical costs. A Marina Abramovic exhibition planned for March 2025, which had already travelled from the Royal Academy in London through Amsterdam, Zurich and Vienna, was cancelled, and four living artists postponed shows, in some cases on the advice of their galleries. The museum had already spent heavily on exhibitions it never received. Yet the director says she would rather be challenged by an artist than boycotted, and that art should generate dialogue rather than silence.

Despite the disruption, the museum has drawn around one million visitors a year over the past three years and recorded record summer attendance. During the war with Iran, staff reinstalled works in protected underground spaces with music-led visits, and the museum continues its Arabic-language outreach and its practice of showing Palestinian artists alongside Israeli ones.