Postcard from Jerusalem

By Amy Sherlock

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From its seat atop a hill overlooking Jerusalem, the Israel Museum looks straight across at the Knesset. At night the squat and severe Israeli Parliament building is lit with wide blue and white stripes making it dramatic, handsome even, softening the prison-block edges of daytime. The museum itself is a vast Modernist complex of geometric modules – glass and the pale Judean limestone that gives the city its particular radiance – organized around a dramatic central sweep of stairs bordered by a shallow stream of water.

The two buildings were constructed almost contemporaneously and inaugurated within a year of one another, the Israel Museum in 1965 and the Knesset in 1966, barely a year before the Six-Year War would irrevocably re-define power relations in the region. Together they flank the west way into Jerusalem, the main artery that leads from Tel Aviv and the coastal ports, twin pillars of state enshrined on facing hills.

No culture can escape the political context in which it is produced and which it in turn must feed into, but I can think of few political circumstances that assert themselves as forcefully as those shaped by the policies made in the Knesset. Especially here, in Jerusalem, the point (and the sticking point) around which the complex and conflicting narratives shaped by those policies enmesh and tangle, where daily life plays out in the middle of and in spite of these tensions. If Tel Aviv, on the coast, looking out over the Mediterranean to Europe, can turn its back to Israel’s (contested) land borders, in Jerusalem this is not possible. As the Israel Museum’s extensive, astonishing archaeological galleries make clear the complications, as well as the beauty, of millennia are condensed and compacted in this city whose walled old town measures less than a square kilometre.

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Visitors play Stanga (street soccer) in front of the Shrine of the Book (which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls) as part of Contact Point

I found myself contemplating the shadows of the Knesset from the Israel Museum on a crisp, rosemary-scented July night during this year’s Jerusalem Season of Culture. Every year since the Season’s inception in 2010 (which coincided with the re-opening of the museum following extensive expansion and renovation), the museum has hosted a one-night-only late night event, Contact Point, one of the highlights of the programme, which, this year, also includes food, dance, performance, public art and will end with the Sacred Music Festival held in various venues across the Old City between August 20–23. By way of introduction to the Season of Culture, its aims and its ethos, Counter Point seems like a good place to start. Each year a number of artists, mostly younger, mostly Israeli, are invited to produce or devise a work for the event that responds to a particular object from the museum’s vast collection (over 500,000 objects; with around 8,500 on display at any one time). The programme emphasises performance and participation, filling the normally still and reverent gallery spaces with the buzz of music, drama and dancing.

As in all museums of state, the galleries of the Israel Museum do not stray too far from the customary parade of the national and international canon, and Contact Point offered an interesting space for counter-narratives to emerge there. Some of the most striking works were those that interacted very directly with the chosen works in the collection, such as performed reenactments of two works by Israeli artists from the mid-1970s, Efrat Natan’s Flag (1974) and Micha Ullman’s Place (1975). Originally a photograph and a video work respectively, these works were re-staged by the artists Racheli Hagigi and Tal Ramon, who invited audience members to perform them live over the course of the evening. Collectively called ‘A Point in Time’, these re-performances, like the original works, in fact asked questions of space and belonging: the proprietorial relationship between space and place, and place and nation. In Flag, Natan lies awkwardly stiff on the floor holding the wooden pole of a flag whose white fabric smothers her head. Close and suffocating, the flag is also a shroud (the body immobile as rigor mortis sets in) – a reminder that a condition of raising one flag is generally the sacrifice or submission of another. (As a woman, it is hard not to read another meaning here: the flag as headscarf worn by Orthodox Jews and devout Muslim women alike, offering an anonymity or security that can also be paralyzing.)

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Efrat Natan, ‘Flag’, 1974, reperformed by audience members as part of ‘A Point in Time’, Rachel Hagigi, Contact Point, 2013

In Micha Ullman’s 1975 film Place (a section of which was re-performed), the artist rakes out a mound of sand that occupies a volume equivalent to that of his own body, dragging it out, dispersing it. Grains scatter; some will be lost, slipping into gaps in the floor, never to return to the gradually, imperceptibly diminishing pile. The contemporary state of Israel was created by drawing lines in the sand and this action reminds us of the slipperiness of place and the fickleness of borders, which are grounded in nothing more stable or concrete (although they sometimes take this form) than the human gestures that maintain them. ‘Out of [the ground] were you taken’, God tells Adam in the book of Genesis: ‘for dust you are, and unto dust shall you return…’ The idea of Zion, Eretz Yisrael, is, at bottom, Adamic: a narrative of being born of the earth, exiled from it, returning to it. Belonging is linked to bodies, to a mythical genealogy of being ‘borne of’, in which land and nation are related in the figure of the father- or motherland, whole and well-formed. But as Ullman suggests and history bears out, nations and the selves they form/shape are not easily containable, but scattered and porous.

Jerusalem’s political situation puts a particular slant on current discussions around the shifting significances of re-performance. What does it mean to re-perform a politicized work from the past? What questions does it ask about the current context? And can the impact be the same? Generally, these things can go one of two ways: either repetition deadens the original impact, some vital connection is severed and the message bleeds out leaving a pale set of formal constraints; otherwise the connection is resuscitated somehow, takes a new shape according to the new context. In this case, the pieces felt as vital and urgent as ever. Neither were conceived of as performances per se and both suggest a particular intimacy or sense of private rituals: having them performed live within (in the case of Flag) or just outside (in the case of Place, an additional invitation to consider the fragile and arbitrary nature of borders) the Israeli art galleries of the national museum begged a whole new set of questions about complicity and responsibility; participation and witnessing.

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Micha Ullman, ‘Place’, 1975, video, 20 mins.

On the paved forecourt of the contemporary art galleries, Faluja, a street artist based mainly in Tel Aviv constructed, over the course of the evening, a sculpture of a crouching boy with wood collected in the streets of Tel Aviv. Hunched over, the figure’s outline is, skeletal, cage-like. Called The Other Boy from South Tel Aviv, he pointed an accusing finer at the towering form of Ohad Meromi’s Boy From South Tel Aviv (2001) stood just inside the gallery doors. Originally installed in the museum as part of the 2008 show ‘Real Time: Art in Israel 1998-2008’ (co-curated by Natan and Amitai Mendelsohn), Meromi’s ‘boy’ is a naked African adolescent, all elongated limbs and awkward gait, a humbling and humanizing reminder of Israel’s migrant African population. Concentrated in the neighbourhoods of South Tel Aviv, these migrant communities, most of whom are fleeing conflicts in Eritrea and Sudan, and many of whom have entered Israel illegally, are a source of continued tension with the local population. Following violent anti-immigration protests in Tel Aviv in May 2012, Miri Regev, a member of parliament from the right-wing Likud Party, famously referred to the immigrant population as ‘a cancer in our body’. Now enshrined in the entrance hall to the renovated fine arts wing, Meromi’s sculpture watches over the unhindered coming and goings of visitors, but I wondered whether the museum’s glass walls offer protection enough against such barbed rhetoric. Faluja’s provocative response is a comment on a different kind of border – that which distinguishes what kind of art and artist can be shown inside the museum and not – but also on who and what are sanctioned representations of discrimination and disenfrachisement in a society where certain conflicts and complexities can blot out others. (With a stroke of either magisterial irony or total lack of self-awareness, Boy From South Tel Aviv has been installed next to a vast, wall-length Damien Hirst spot painting: figure of poverty struggling for social acceptance meets gold-minted token of accession to contemporary art’s global elite.)

To curb the problem of illegal immigrants (or ‘infiltrators’ as they are often officially referred to in the militarized language of the state) Israel has built a razor-wire-topped fence along its border with Egypt in the Sinai, completed earlier this year. Where once there was a line in the sand, now there is a wall. Another one. Which I suppose somehow brings me to the heart of the matter in terms both of the evening and the season itself. Contact Point aims to encourage dialogue, engagement, and participation – between artists and the public; between art forms; between groups and organizations perhaps working similarly but unknown to each other; between artist and audiences and their own political and cultural history. It provides a space for collaboration as well as for discord and dissonance and this year’s results were rich, varied, enjoyable. But from the hilltop across the way, the Knesset casts a very long shadow, and talk of openness and communication takes place against a very real, very concrete architecture of separation, division and isolation. The Palestinian (and international) boycott of Israeli arts and culture makes conversation difficult but, even with the other side listening, it’s hard to speak across a wall.

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Faluja works on his ‘Other Boy From South Tel Aviv’ in front of the contemporary art galleries

Certainly, Jerusalem’s Season of Culture is not aiming to overcome the city’s divisions through art or song or dance, or even through food (a highlight of this year’s programme is a travelling food truck where a different guest chef will cook a special dish each day in a different neighbourhood). And it doesn’t have to. Even art has its limitations. What it does do is give a platform for those artists and organizations – secular, liberal, moderate – whose voices are often lost in the fray, drowned out by the nationalist and religious hardliners on both sides. It is a voice which is a minority in this city, and one which‚ in the face of the often bellicose political rhetoric, needs to be heard, both inside the city and beyond.

And maybe this is enough: to give space and support to nurture this relatively tolerant and open-minded sector of the population, who might otherwise escape to stick their heads in the sands of Tel Aviv. Certainly, there are artists and collectives doing valuable work here. Take Muslala, a group of artists that works with communities in the neighbourhood of Musrara on what was the Israeli-Jordan border, a former no-man’s-land split along its own complex fault lines between Mizrahi, Ashkenazi and Haredi Jews, as well as the Arab Jerusalemites in the east part of the neighbourhood. Muslala’s projects revalorize local histories, encourage interactions and work to build bridges in spite of the very definitive, very real separation of the eastern and western parts of the neighbourhood by a multilane freeway that was recently constructed along the former (1967) border. (There are no longer checkpoints here, but divisions, even within the ‘reunited’ city, are surreptitiously enforced, sometimes in the name of progress.) And there are artists making beautiful work, such as the musicians Maya Dunietz and Ilan Volkov, who have been working for the past two years to transcribe the musical scores of the nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Now 90 years old, Tsegué has been living in Jerusalem’s Ethiopian monastery since 1984 but composing and playing music for decades longer. (The book of scores, as well as a new biography, was launched as part of the Season of Culture and Emahoy herself will perform at the Sacred Music festival on 20 August).

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Emahoy Tsegué Mariam Guèbru, Music for Piano, (ed. Evgeny Oslon; notation by Maya Dunietz and Ilan Volkov), released as part of Jerusalem Season of Culture

But then again, maybe events like these normalize a status quo, an ‘under the circumstances’, that is tolerable for this sector of the population whilst almost certainly less so for those East Jerusalemites for whom political disenfranchisement is less a question of muted voices and more of being denied access to more basic and fundamental democratic provisions such citizenship, being able to vote or holding a passport.

Almost certainly, Jerusalem Season of Culture is both of these things. This befits a capital of two nations, a holy city of three religions and, as the scriptures have it, a realm of both heaven and earth. To attribute something to this city begs the question: ‘Whose Jerusalem?’ And as the muted optimism about the recommencement of Israeli–Palestinian peace talks this week suggests, we are still a long way from an answer.

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