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The Jerusalem Show |
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FRACTURES | ||||
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The Jerusalem Show VII is curated by Basak Senova and organized by Al-Ma'mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem. The Jerusalem Show VII: FRACTURES runs from 24 October to 7 November 2014. The show will be presented in the framework of the second Qalandiya International (Qi), ARCHIVES, LIVED AND SHARED. Qi is a coalition of local institutions working together to feature a month-long programme of live events, talks, exhibitions, guided tours, symposia, film screenings and performances. The Jerusalem Show VII is an integral part of the 2014 edition of Qalandiya International, scheduled to take place from 22 October to 15 November. FRACTURES is composed of seven chapters that will take place simultaneously: INTENSITIES, DETAILS, INTERVALS, MEASURES, LINES, WRITING and FABRIC. These chapters present exhibitions, site-specific art projects, performances, artist books, book launches, walks, talks and screenings. Qalandiya International is the culmination of the vision and effort of a group of prominent Palestinian cultural institutions focusing on contemporary art. This includes the following institutions: Riwaq; Al-Ma’mal; the A. M. Qattan Foundation; the Palestinian Museum; Palestinian Art Court – Al Hoash; the International Academy of Art Palestine; the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre; the Ramallah Municipality; and the Arab Culture Association in Haifa. Qalandiya International is also in partnership this year with MinRASY Projects, Windows for Contemporary Art in Gaza and Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art in Gaza. The media partner for the Jerusalem Show is Ibraaz, the online critical forum for visual culture in North Africa and the Middle East. As part of the Jerusalem Show VII, Ibraaz has dedicated a section of its platform to publishing an online ‘catalogue’ detailing the artists’ activities and accompanying events.
The Jerusalem Show VII Basak Senova |
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Introduction
An event in a defined setting is never experienced, perceived and remembered in the same way. In Deleuze's words, 'events are produced in a chaos, in a chaotic multiplicity, but only under the condition that a sort of screen intervenes. Accordingly, 'time' perceived by the witness, the participant or the follower of any event cannot be the same. The sensuous links between the internal and the external realms are always diverse, and therefore the perception of time becomes fractured within them. The starting point of FRACTURES is Jerusalem, a city that persistently folds multiple pasts into contradictory presents. In this line of thought, FRACTURES gathers research-based projects that detect and process multiple realities and perceptions of events and conditions in relation with different time sequences while taking 'Jerusalem' as the nucleus of this attempt. The basic aim of the project is to establish and discover links between diverse artistic research, cases and actions accumulated in the course of the project and the daily realities of the city. FRACTURES is not about perceiving multiple time segments co-existing in this historical city, but is an attempt to describe how visions and sights can be read from different points of view . The core challenge is to read affectual flows in-between fractures of time. The aim is to detect similar details and hidden mechanisms in order to open up new platforms of association and conversations on life, politics, culture, economics, psychology, and art. Within this, the deeper question is how to process Jerusalem as the 'standing reserve' of this course of action. FRACTURES has been developed and shaped by artistic research, enquiries, approaches, viewpoints, and projects that revolved around the project of the Jerusalem Show and the context within which it is staged. It is composed of seven chapters that unfold simultaneously during the course of The Jerusalem Show, and in the framework of the 2nd Qalandiya International: ARCHIVES, LIVED AND SHARED.
CHAPTER 1 By definition, 'intensity' refers to the degree or amount of strength or force that something has. The perception of its velocity is based on the interpretations of ideas, of attention, duration, and correlations with other things or beings. Deleuze considers intensity as a spatio-temporal dynamism and links it directly with the degree of differences. From this point of view, intensity has a connection not only with difference, but also with desire. By referring to music, he points out that intensity could be perceived at the level of 'the in-between'. Basically, in music intensity is the measurable acoustic counterpart of perceived loudness. Starting from this line of thought, the exhibition will focus on the different levels of intensity that can be detected and processed from the projects produced for the exhibition that link the observed and perceived intensities felt within Jerusalem. At the same time, the exhibition will examine the relationship between 'events' and their unsettled intensities. The exhibition takes place at Al Ma'mal, located at the Tile Factory, which was originally founded in the old city of Jerusalem at the turn of the century and operated up to 1975, functioning as one of the two primary traditional tile-making factories in Palestine, and which was then transformed into a space for art and culture. The history of the building has been one of the anchors for the exhibition; it physically designates the starting point of the Jerusalem Show by housing works that deal directly with the city and the region. The exhibition starts with a film: The Goodness Regime (2013), written and directed by Jumana Manna and Sille Storihle. The film, shot both in Norway and Palestine, probes into the foundations of ideology by intersecting different time sequences and conditions with one common denominator: The Oslo Peace Accords. The film, which employs a cast of children, re-enacts the adventures of Nobel Peace Prize winner Fridtj of Nansen – who aided displaced victims of World War I in the 1920s as a commissioner for the League of Nations – alongside a study into the political failure of the Oslo Accords in 1993, signed by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization and facilitated by Norway as a peacemaker. The film brings different imaginaries, political visions, ideologies, histories and realities together to be perceived simultaneously. |
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The exhibition continues with Adel Abidin's installation Yesterday (2014). The work starts with the word 'yesterday' rendered in solid bronze and located on a wall in an isolated room. Then, it spreads all around the old city of Jerusalem with a subtle presence through a number of standing displays that repeat the word in white on white surfaces. It is a simple word, referring to countless time and memories.
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Within the Tile Factory inhabits an extensive spatial installation, The Temporary Archive (prelude) (2014) by Benji Boyadgian. It is a part of an ongoing project titled The Temporary Ruin, in which the artist records the valley of Wadi el-Shami with watercolour paintings created in-situ. In the Tile Factory, he represents the topography of the valley with the walls and these paintings, which question the temporality of land in a broader sense, while evidencing the fragments of the traditional Palestinian landscape. |
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Pekka Niittyvirta's aerial photography series Obliquity (2014), which depicts Jerusalem by night, oscillates between a fictional setting and a fact-based document. These photographs interrupt our acknowledged imagery of Jerusalem, derived from well-known media images. |
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In a similar manner, Bashar Alhroub's ink drawing Less Holiness (2014), which illustrates Jerusalem in details, swings between the touristic imagery of the city and a segregated zone with invisible barriers, thus creating a sense of dislocation between these two contradictory urban states. |
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In this sense, Hiraki Sawa's video work Dwelling (2002) further underlines the notion of dislocation with grainy black and white footage of miniature aircrafts flying around in an apartment setting, while Cevdet Erek's installation with drawings, words, and sound, Why can't I be there now? (2014), brings another twist. The intention of the work is to justify Erek's excuses for his absence in Jerusalem, based on fractures of time and space: multiple crossings of events, travels, and deadlines in his schedule. |
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CHAPTER 2 A detail indicates a type of voyage that starts a voyage through the activation of memory. A detail always has the potential to become the evidence that gives further information about a state of a conflict, confrontation, struggle, calculation, adaptation, exclusion, occupation, acceptance, and resistance. Therefore, the primary point of convergence, which generates the whole conceptual frame of this chapter, is processing details in a flux of time segments. For this chapter, therefore, artists produced and/or re-shaped their existing projects in synch with their detail-based research and findings on mixed, discontinuous and dislocated structures, events, stories, and memories both of Jerusalem and overlapping cases from different geographies. Rula Halawani's photography series Confused Memories (2014) is located at Hammam Sitna Mariam, and displays dreamlike landscapes of Palestine. In this abandoned venue, the artist processes the current state of Palestine with extracted memories from her childhood. |
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Respectively, Noor Abuarafeh's work also resonates between the collective and the personal, by recalling the past on the bordeaux walls of the Austrian Hospice of the Holy Family, proposing a different perspective with which to read an archive based on personal stories. Abufareh does this by re-archiving her grandfathers' family archive of black and white photographs that were taken in Palestine, Lebanon and Egypt. |
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Jesper Just's video Installation Intercourses (2013) transforms the derelict Hammam Sitna Mariam into an architectural pastiche along with suspended screens from the domes of the building, bamboo, special LED lights for plants, and light bulbs left over from Ramadan. On three screens, the film monitors three men, interwoven within the scenes, by taking the city as the main character. The amalgamation of the past, diverging memories, obscured dreams, and lost stories operate together in this enchanted setting. |
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Hera Büyüktasçiyan's work is based on research she conducted around the Patriarch's Pool: a project that focuses on one of Jerusalem's lost water supplies. By reviving the memory of the water with an architectural intervention at the emptied pool, The Recovery of an Early Water (2014) questions the social, political and historical memory of the city. |
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Buyuktasciyan's entire research on the Patriarch's Pool and sketches of her project also being documented and presented at Nicola Zaphiriades' Shop. |
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Hiraki Sawa, presents Migration (2003), which explores the fragile experience of reality – ever-changing, intangible, not easily outlined or defined. Sawa captures the sense of being nowhere, a continued displacement and migration: a relentless and transient home-making by investigating the different meanings of moving, travelling and changing places: of going beyond the border, or the gaps between things. |
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Jonathan Loppin and Paul Devens approach Jerusalem's local realities as outsiders; from different points of view, they observe, witness, and underline what has been repeated on a daily basis not only in the city, but in the country itself. Devens' site-specific sound-based installation Drop (2014) at the Center for Jerusalem Studies- Al Quds Courtyard, takes the act of 'listenig' as 'specific, directive and political next to its everyday manifestations' through a sonic experience based on sounds movements and specific field recordings. |
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On the other hand, Loppin performs Blocus (2014) with 50 objects, which were prohibited from entering the Gaza Strip by Israeli authorities (listed in 2010 by Gisha, an Israeli human rights association), first in Jerusalem and then in other Palestinian cities. Each performance leaves a trace through a video documentation that will be accumulated at the Swedish Christian Study Centre during the Jerusalem Show. |
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Ceren Oykut's extensive spatial installation Atlas of Interruptions (2014) at Hammam el-Shifa (in Chapter 3, Intervals) is presented alongside Carta-Magica (2014), which is a modest intervention with light and shadow, at the Arab Catholic Scouts – Jerusalem. Both of the works respond to the realities of the city by hinging on its details. |
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Gülsün Karamustafa's project The Bookbinder Lived and Worked in Jerusalem takes over Gallery Anadiel and reanimates a bookbinding shop by rediscovering traces of the past. Karamustafa customizes the shop by uncovering and adding old information with new materials. The echoing memories of the place are also carried by and with the visitors; they can be old friends of the shop or newcomers, sharing unspoken memories within the space. |
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Majd Abdel Hamid also uses a shop window at the same street. His work Hourglass #1 (2014) displays hourglasses in different sizes on a shop window in the old city of Jerusalem. The powder in this hourglass consists of crushed cement chipped from the Wall in the West Bank mixed with sand grain |
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In the same vein, Zehra Sonya's work Red Clouds (2014) located at Arab Catholic Scouts – Jerusalem, investigates the links between cities and personal memories as a way of reading history. Red Clouds is based on the idea of attempting to collect untainted memories and to overlap them with the untold stories of the old city of Jerusalem through the venue. Accordingly, the artist started her work by detecting and collecting stories from her memory. Then, she asked two people who speak Arabic and English, to retell her stories as their own, which are then processed through semi-transparent red clouds. The presence of 'light' in the work underlines an individual metaphysical approach by indicating the notion of hope and the act of healing. |
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CHAPTER 3
Will we then come to the realization that our thought has become afterthought, Intervals are about possibilities: they show that other orders and potentials do exist. They indicate in-between situations and sometimes a lapse with endless prospects and intensities. The unpredictability of their potential always creates a tension between an indefinite process – insignificant and ephemeral – and an expectation, which foreshadows a striking event, yet to come. But we also perceive a sense of order and time only through intervals. Conor McGrady and Ceren Oykut participate in this chapter with their site-specific drawings, which have been directly applied to the interior walls of Hammam el-Ayn and Hammam el-Shifa. Both hammams will be subject to renovation by Al Quds University within six months: the traces of both artists and their work in these deserted venues will fade away in definite time. Atlas of Interruptions (2014) by Ceren Oykut compromises of detailed drawings in various sizes, spread across the walls of Hammam el-Shifa. These are mundane and familiar details, extracted from daily life, indicating no information regarding time and space. Through her drawings, she discovers new lands and diverse realities while invoking the sense of trespassing. Once again a city – this time Jerusalem – is not only the setting but also the background of her obscure dreams. |
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On the other hand, Hammam el-Ayn, which is located across Hammam el-Shifa, Conor McGrady confronts another structure – an uninhabited hammam – with massive drawings. Conor examines architecture as a means of containment and control and this time, and in Peripheral Vision (2014), structure does not only manifest an indication of power and protection, but also an aspiration associated with healing. The work inhabits imageries and architectural indications of other overloadeded power structures, such as prisons, bunkers and military installations. |
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Once hosting people from all around the world, now these two hammams welcome other perspectives and journeys CHAPTER 4 In the relation between what is said and its taking place, it was possible to bracket the subject of enunciation, since speech had already taken place. But the relation between language and its existence, between langue and the archive, demands subjectivity as that which, in its very possibility of speech, bears witness to an impossibility of speech. This is why subjectivity appears as witness; this is why it can speak for those who cannot speak. It would be a delusion to consider an archive as a stable source for truth. Nevertheless, the act of archiving and collecting is very important for uncovering – whether objective or biased – unspoken and neglected issues. It presents a potential to challenge the user to confront muted realities. Therefore, an archive may also become a tool for tactile, emotional, and experience-based communication and could open up a space for exchanging 'unrecognized' and 'unregistered' information for its users. In this chapter, the very act of collecting and archiving is linked with a presence of a library. Thus, two distinctive projects, based on extensive research by Tom Nicholson and Raqs Media Collective, route their way in this presence. The site-specific installation The Unwritten Library (2014) seeks new ideas and thoughts as the neglected outcome of difficult times. The work is about 'the idea of books that are simultaneously unwritten even as they are erasures of books already written.' Hence, The Unwritten Library invites the viewer to collect past and future dreams, ideas, and thoughts. |
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Comparative Monument (Ma'man Allah) (2012–2014) is based on a long-term research on the Australian Eucalyptus trees in the ancient Ma'man Allah/Mamilla cemetery in Jerusalem. The work tracesa walk through 69 seeds, displayed at Khalidi Library, accompanied with a book and a proposition for a future monument as another walk in another landscape |
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CHAPTER 5 In Deleuze and Guattari’s work there is an emphasis on the expression ‘se rabat sur’ or ‘to fall back onto’ as a term in projective geometry. It is like knowing that a short-looking line actually indicates a long line with an angle on an architectural plan, or that things, events, and people can be perceived and experienced differently depending on the locations of the points and lines. Our distance to, and viewpoint of, different realities, different lives, different conditions, different dreams, and different fallacies shape our assumptions in life. This screening programme, which is free of charge and open to the public, consists of four chapters and a feature film, responsively reflecting on the shifting points and lines in life. Chapter 1 |
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Just as the word ‘fracture’ suggests a break or disruption, the experience of time in these films is fragmented, distorted, ambivalent or indeterminate. In Shifts and Interruptions, artists use – and in some cases, blend – various genres, from science fiction to animation to documentary, to create situations in which different histories or time frames are evoked, various 'realities' appear to coexist, or an imaginary space-time is created. Whether reflective of a state of contemporary consciousness or a search for a constructed space that is at once futuristic and suggestive of times past, these works speak of anticipation, longing, disassociation and loss. Basim Magdy, Crystal Ball, 7' (2013) Artists in alphabetical order. Chapter 2 |
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Chapter 3 Too Much History Boris Cvjetanović, One Life Fits a Lot, 1’20’’, 2014 Artists in alphabetical order. Chapter 4 |
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Dislocating Patterns brings four not allied, but most probably remarkably connected, works together; they detect and process diverse approaches, viewpoints, geographies, and catastrophes yet to come. Each of them show paths to be lost, stories to be told, and personal details to haunt. Dislocating Patterns suggests a challenging act for the viewer: it is a tidal experience between watching and witnessing sorrow and beauty at the same time. Ali Cherri, The Disquiet, 20’ (2013) Artists in alphabetical order. |
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The Palestinian Premier of the film SIVAS(2014) CHAPTER 6 Al-Ma'mal (The Tile Factory) and Swedish Christian Study Centre A musician acts both vertically and horizontally in multiple time segments while performing with an instrument and notes. Reading the notes on both treble and bass clefs at the same time signifies the vertical reading; reading the 'yet to come' part while playing in the present time, when connected with the performed element, indicates a perception of multiple times simultaneously. All forms of performance constitute the act of 'writing' rather than reading for the audience. The question, then, is how to multiply and superimpose this act within a current situation in the city. Artist walk by Benji Boyadgian The old city, perched on a rock, has been destroyed, rebuilt, venerated and contested throughout its history. While the brutal contemporary fracture unfolds in our sight, there is no escaping the fractured sediments of its history. Experiences are numerous while meandering through the Kasbah fabric and every stone has stories to tell. In this timeless labyrinth networks of walks and ideas collide. The exhibitions are scattered around the city in different venues, their localities invites different routes. Three different walks encompass all the sites, every route tells a different story of the multiple facets of Jerusalem. |
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Programme Sunday, 19 October 2014, Talk: Hera Büyüktasçian Monday, 20 October 2014, Talk: Conor McGrady Tuesday, 21 October 2014, Talk: Paul Devens Friday, 24 October 2014 Performance, Jonathan Loppin |
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Friday, 24 October 2014 Exhibition tour led by Basak Senova Friday, 24 October 2014 Sound performance, Paul Devens, in collaboration with Durbakeh performer Raed Issa, |
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Friday, 24 October 2014 Reception of the Jerusalem Show VII Saturday, 25 October 2014 Unmade Film. Book presentation and reading: Uriel Orlow and Andrea Thal |
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Saturday, 25 October 2014 Talk: Yazid Anani, Anne Barlow, Branko Franceschi, and Basak Senova Saturday, 25 October 2014 Film Premier in Palestine: Sivas, directed by Kaan Müjdeci Sunday, 26 October 2014 Performance, Jonathan Loppin Monday, October 27, 2014 Performance, Jonathan Loppin Tuesday, October 28 2014 Performance, Jonathan Loppin Sunday, 2 November 2014 Walk, Benji Boyadgian Tuesday, 4 November 2014 Walk, Benji Boyadgian Wednesday, 5 November 2014 Walk, Benji Boyadgian Friday 7 November, Exhibition Closing Tour CHAPTER 7 This chapter is dedicated to the presentation of the following 'artist books'. Click on the artist names below to view each section. |
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I Artist Books Hani Amra, Works Ahead!, 2014 Designed by Hani Amra and Basak Senova. Published by Al Ma'mal Foundation. Banu Cennetoglu, CATALOG, 2009. Pavilion of Turkey, 53rd Venice Biennale. Cevdet Erek, SSS – Shore Scene Sountrack / Theme and Variations for Carpet, 2008. Published by BAS as a part of Bent series. Maxime Hourani, A Book of Songs and Places, 2013. Edited by Basak Senova, Designed by Maxime Hourani. Published by IKSV for the 13th Istanbul Biennial. ISBN: 978-605-5275-13-6 Ciprian Homorodean, Survival Strategies. Take the Book, Take the Money, Run!, 2010. Jill Magid, Failed States, 2012. Designed by Emily Lessard. Published by Publication Studio. ISBN: 9781935662044 Tom Nicholson, Comparative Monument (Ma'man Allah): A Guide Book to a Collection of 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensis Seeds in the Khalidi Library, 2009. Jerusalem, Surpllus. ISBN 978-1-922099-11-2 Raqs Media Collective, The Great Bare Mat and Installation, 2012. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. ISBN 978-0-914660-316 Uriel Orlow, Unmade Film, 2014. Edited by Andrea Thal and Uriel Orlow with contributions by Erik Bullot, Yoa'd Ghanadry, Avery Gordon, Esmail Nashif, Ilan Pappé, Hanan Toukan, Andrea Thal and Uriel Orlow. Designed by Georg Rutishauser and Sonja Zagerman; Edition fink, Zurich. (English/Arabic/German/French) ISBN 978-3-03746-178-5 Anita Di Bianco, Corrections and Clarifications, 2001-2014. (15 editions: various publishers, various formats, various lengths, and various languages). Daniel Knorr, Sanatçi kitabi, 2013. BAS, Istanbul. II The Jerusalem Show VII: FRACTURES Children’s Activity Book, illustrated and designed by Erhan Muratoglu and supported by Kamel Lazaar Foundation, 2014. Downloadable on www.ibraaz.org/publications/6. |
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Footnotes: Gilles Deleuze, The Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, the University of Minnesota Press, 1992, p60. Toufic, Jalal. "Afterthought by the Editor". Lapses/*2 The Book Series of Pavilion of Turkey in the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennial.Ed. Jalal Toufic. First Vol. IKSV. Istanbul, p. 7 ISBN: 978-975-7363-78-1 Extracted from the artistic statement of Raqs Media Collective. This text was originally published on Ibraaz.org as part of The Jerusalem Show VII's online catalogue, which was produced in collaboration with Ibraaz, media partner of The Jerusalem Show VII: FRACTURES, and with the support of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation. |
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