Enacting art means displacing the borders of art, just as enacting politics means displacing the borders of what is recognized as the sphere of the political (Jacques Rancière 2005)

An enormous black viper made of cloth, rusty L-shaped pipes, a locked iron cage, a huge metal scale, styrofoam coffins and mirrors with inscriptions in red paint. Who decides whether these objects have an artistic value, or whether they are functional, practical tools within a certain political context? On what grounds can the decision be made? It is the place where the objects are located, the way in which they are being used, the eye of the beholder, the authority of their creator, or maybe some internal aspect that resides in the objects themselves?

The residents of Bil’in village fight against the imposition of the separation wall on their land for the last six years. As part of their struggle, the Bil’in Popular Committee Against the Wall filed numerous appeals to the Israeli Supreme Court, the village hosts yearly international conferences on the subject of popular resistance, and weekly demonstrations that include residents as well as Israeli and international supporters. Although the last few months have shown an escalation in the army’s use of excessive force to disperse the demonstrators, the Bil’in demonstrations retain their unique character. Each weekly demonstration has a specific theme and most demonstrations include the use of sculptural objects. During one demonstration, for example, demonstrators marched from the village houses towards the trajectory of the wall, carrying above their heads a huge black viper made of cloth. Some protestors carried smaller versions of the viper around their necks. In another demonstration demonstrators locked themselves inside an iron cage that was fastened firmly to the ground.

The same viper and the same cage were later presented in the exhibition “Fence Art”, which opened in March 2006 at the Minshar For Art Gallery in Tel Aviv. The snake was placed in a half-circle on the floor close to the entrance door, greeting visitors as they entered the gallery, and the cage was placed at the back of the gallery space. L-shaped segments of rusty pipes, that were previously used to tether demonstrators to the ground, hung now in a row on the wall, arranged in different angles and lit by spotlights.

Clearly, the way in which the sculpture-objects were experienced in the gallery and in the fields of Bil’in was completely different: here a white cube exposition, and there a politically-bound action. Nevertheless, I argue that the changed context does not necessarily lead to a change in essence. In both the demonstrations and the exhibition, the sculpture-objects led their viewers into a process of challenging accepted hierarchies and questioning common viewpoints.

Just after the opening of the exhibition, Haaretz art critic Dana Gilerman interviewed Oded Yedaya, the curator of the exhibition and an active participant in the Bil’in demonstrations, and Mohammad Khatib, a member of the Bil’in Pupular Committee Against the Wall and the maker of most of the sculptures. Gilerman raises important questions with regards to the power plays involved in moving the sculpture-objects from the political to the artistic field. In the interview Yedaya asserted that the sculpture-objects were first and foremost artworks, and that Khatib is an artist in this respect. Khatib himself stressed the fact that he is not an artist and that he would have preferred the sculpture-objects to appear in close connection with the explanatory material found in the next room, in a sort of a documentary exhibition. The Curator and the creator also differed with regard to their respective reasons for mounting the exhibition. Khatib’s main objective was to get further exposure for Bil’in in the Israeli media, while Yedaya also wanted to create an intellectual discussion that would explore the possibilities of the terms “drafted art” and “drafted gallery”.
In her article Gilerman argues against Yedaya’s choice to frame the sculptures as art, “as if the art world found a new toy to adorn itself with”. But on the other hand, after interviewing Khatib, Gilerman concludes that “the way in which he discusses the creative process… and his entire way of thinking strengthens the assumption that he is a true artist”, thus agreeing in principle with Yedaya’s approach. The attempt to define the different actors and objects takes up most of Gilerman’s article, and points to the complexity of figuring out whose voice is it anyway, and who has the power or the legitimacy to decide how to frame objects, statements and struggles.

Gilerman’s text was taken up by Yisrael Palda in his article “art in the service of politics” (published in Omedia website) to argue against the “dubious freedom” of postmodern curatorship that “allows the curator to define art, to say who is an artist even without presenting proper proof – and to present the facts in a way that adheres with his subjective political option as if these are objective values.” Palda ignores Gilerman’s doubt and reads “Fence Art” as a pure curatorial confiscation of non-art products. However, based on Palda’s clear-cut denunciation, as well as on Gilerman’s half-hearted criticism, I would like to argue otherwise. It seems to me that the sculpture-objects created a rupture in the accepted scheme of “politics” and “art” in the gallery just as much as they destabilized the roles of demonstrators and soldiers in the field. In what follows I will interpret both “performances” of the sculpture-objects through Jacques Rancière’s theory of aesthetics and politics to suggest that the focus on curatorial appropriation leads us away from a much more interesting and relevant discussion regarding the political effects of aesthetic practice, with regards to “Fence Art” in particular and to art exhibitions in general.

Bil’in a-la-Rancière: Redistibuting Visibilities
The use of the sculptures-objects in the demonstrations was quite varied. In one demonstration, demonstrators held styrofoam coffins in their hands to symbolize the consequences that the wall has for their lives, and in another they carried huge scales to denote justice. A more theatrical demonstration was headed by a fake scaffold from which a dozen people were hanging, all covered in white cloth. In other cases, flesh, iron and earth interacted even more intimately, when the sculpture-objects fastened protestors to their place so that they could not be moved easily. Examples include demonstrators attached to the ground by the metal foundations of a model of the separation wall, tied to olive trees with metal chains, or fastened to the road with the help of “lock-ons”.

These cases are exemplary of many other demonstrations where the sculpture-objects had a clear message, operating as three-dimensional banners or disturbing the construction work. In addition, these demonstrations involved the active participation of the soldiers whose task was to safeguard the construction of the wall. The latter found themselves involved in bizarre situations, as they took the mock-fence apart, broke the metal cage open, argued with absurdly dressed-up demonstrators or cut the chains loose from the trees. This marks Bilin’s distinction from customary protest actions.
In the interview with Gilerman, Khatib emphasizes the sculpture-objects function within the demonstrations. He contends that the sculpture-objects undermine constituents of violence and repetitiveness that could minimize public interest. Mass demonstrations are common and consequently their messages are exhausted and worn-out, and so adding entertainment to the equation seems to be the key to media success. According to Khatib, the demonstrations’ creative aspect encourages residents and attracts a large amount of supporters and media coverage, but when the case of Bil’in is examined from Rancière’s perspective the use of sculpture-objects can be understood not only as a motivational tool, or as a media attention grabber, but in terms of a shift in the politics of resistance.

Rancière defines “politics” as first and foremost a battle about perceptible or sensible material. Politics aims for the rearrangement of the existing “distribution of the sensible”, that is, the laws that prescribe what can be heard and seen in a specific political and social constellation. The essence of political struggle, according to Rancière, does not consist of gathering people into communities and fighting for the rights of these communities. Rather, it consists of exposing subjectivities that challenge existing social delineations and hierarchies. Rancière contrasts politics [la politique] with police [la police]. The police is “a form of intervention which prescribes what can be seen and what cannot be seen, what can be said and what cannot be said” (1998:28). Political action stands in opposition to this prescription of the police, and consists of “transforming this space of ‘moving-along’ into a space for the appearance of a subject” (2001:9). Politics, according to this definition, must break with the social order and create subjects and scenes of dialogue that did not exist beforehand.

But how does this take place, and how can the policed “distribution of the sensible” be redistributed? Spectacle could be one tool to compel acknowledgment: there is definitely something to see when there are costumes and sculptures around. However, for Rancière, spectacle is not enough. He discusses a deeper level of invisibility, where people and events are seen but are not acknowledged as meaningful subjects. Whenever a minority group achieves recognition for its rights, it also simultaneously reaffirms the existing power structure. The real rebellion lies in transgressing forms of accepted and expected social norms, positions and behaviors. Rancière summarizes this aspect in “Ten Theses on Politics” when he writes,

If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being, you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understanding what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths… And the politics of these categories has always consisted in making what was unseen visible… in demonstrating to be a feeling of shared “good” or “evil” what had appeared merely as an expression of pleasure or pain. (2001:10)

The Bil’in sculpture-objects are a political argument in this vein. They overturn a denial of recognition, and create, every week, a possible world where the colonizing parties are required to see the colonized in a light that they normally would have no reason to see. The widespread perception of Palestinians as an occupied people is that of fighters and/or victims. Palestinians appear in the (Israeli and Western) media regularly, either as a mass of young men who fill the streets in demonstrations and funerals, or as individual women, children or old men, helplessly telling stories of suffering and loss. The first type of image brings home to the viewer the potential of violence; the second bears witness to a victimhood that may bring about a sense of guilt or indifference. Palestinians are thus typically portrayed as either dangerously powerful or utterly powerless, but not as equals to those watching or controlling their actions.

The use of sculptural objects leads to a break with the victimized or violent conception of the Palestinian subject. It makes it difficult to perceive the inhabitants of Bil’in in terms of the conventional roles described above. Through the sculptures, the demonstrators define themselves as performers, join a contemporary international activist-art world, and demand that their political claims be heard from another angle. They disrupt the organizational principle of society and make themselves visible as social partners, through their appropriation of the tools of the bourgeois. The notion of the free artist is of course problematic, but the Bil’in demonstrators do not explore this fallacy; they exploit the myth of artistic freedom for their own purposes. “The particular feature of political dissensus”, Rancière tells us, “[consists of] the ones making visible the fact that they belong to a shared world the other does not see” (2001:10). The Bil’in inhabitants mould sculpture-objects in part as a means to reach a similar goal. Their use of art makes visible their creative equality to the ruling class, comprised in this case of Israeli citizens and soldiers, and thus changes the taken-for-granted power relations and opens up a space for situations of speech and dialogue that did not exist previously. Their appeal to the basic right of keeping their land is empowered by an aesthetic move that asserts their right to appeal on as equals in the first place.

Disagreements: Politics and Aesthetics
The relocation of the sculpture-objects from Bil’in to Tel-Aviv had a strong effect on the way they were defined, received and appreciated. In Bil’in the sculptures took a material part in demonstrations, and reframed a struggle between villagers and army as a theatrical happening. In Tel-Aviv the sculptures were displayed as abstract art, fitting to the space that hosted them. In Bil’in, sculptures were in constant movement, carried, worn or held by demonstrators. In Tel Aviv the objects stood still, detached from the people who built them and from the ground that was an integral part of their message. In Bil’in the sculptures were never meant to last, and some were dismantled and taken apart during the events. They were connected through time, as each object was the focus of a separate demonstration, and the collection grew in a steady weekly rhythm. In Tel-Aviv the sculptures from various demonstrations were put together, sharing the same space, and were presented in a way that did not invite onlookers to touch, not to mention destroy. All in all, the change in context seems to have changed almost every aspect of the viewer’s experience of the sculptural objects.

At first sight such a change, caused by Yedaya’s curatorial approach, seems indeed to support a reading of the exhibition as a clear-cut violent and silencing appropriation of a poignant political event. If someone does not want to be named artist and does not want his work to be seen as art, no one should be able to tag them as such against their will. However, it is important to note that Khatib’s rejection of the title “artist” was uttered in the context of the exhibition, not in the context of the demonstrations. As Khatib tells Gilerman: “The power and the beauty of the tools that I made manifest themselves in the demonstration itself. As far as I’m concerned, only there are they art”. This statement is significant, if we take into account that any political (or artistic) action is always specific and context-bound. By denying the sculpture-objects’ artistic aspect in the context of a gallery space, Khatib emphasized their – and his – political character. This move is the mirror image of Khatib’s relation to the sculptures in the politically-framed space of Bil’in, where he emphasizes their artistic aspect. What Khatib accentuated is the sculpture-objects’ adherence to two incompatible classifications, as artifacts (engaged and functional) and as art (disengaged and formal) at one and the same time, but never completely one or the other. In the vein of Rancière, precisely that pinpoints their political potential.

As we have seen, Rancière’s understanding of what constitutes politics is intrinsically aesthetic, because it is an “attempt of reconfiguring the partitions of time and space” to bring new forms into vision. The political is aesthetic because it creates a renewed perception of the relationships between the sayable, the see-able, and the doable in a social reality (Guénoun and Kavanagh 2000:17). However, Rancière has also a second, narrower definition of “aesthetics”, not as a dimension of the political experience, but as a way of refusing the pragmatic system that defines proper ways for making and judging art and differentiates between artworks according to forms, genres, mediums, and so forth, (2004: 91). The way in which the “distribution of the sensible” takes place within this representative regime of art is no different than the policing of the social order in general: each art form has its clear place, and there are no exceptions, no voids. The aesthetic regime, on the other hand, approaches art objects from a conceptual point of view and relates to their mode of being, extricated from their ordinary connections (2004:22). Thus, the aesthetic regime is political just as much as the political act is aesthetic: it is meant to invalidate ordinary hierarchies incorporated in everyday sensory experience, and to reorganize the accepted perception of reality.
In this light, it is possible to see how the presentation of the sculptures in an independent fashion, apart from the documentation of their original function, did not necessarily neutralize their dissident character. Conjured as an independent aesthetic event but at the same time reminiscent of the past life of its sculptures, Fence Art opens a distinct set of issues that would not have been relevant to the sculptures’ role in Bil’in, but that bear a certain continuity to it nevertheless. In the field, the Bil’in inhabitants transgressed the order of things by being something other than politically oppressed protestors. In the gallery, the Bil’in sculptures subvert this order by being something other than artworks. Thus, the exhibition does not limit the sculpture-objects to mere representations of an external, past process, but instead shifts their center of gravity in accordance with their new location.

The distribution of the sculpture-objects in the gallery space separately from the photographs that documented their function in Bil’in, spurred a discussion with regards to their significance, and brought their volatile identity to the fore. This curatorial move is not equivalent to Khatib’s confusion of the roles of art and politics, but it is also not opposed to it as much as it would seem at first sight. Fence Art was structured as another step in the fortune of the sculpture-objects, rather than as a post-mortem display. It allowed the sculptures to remain politically poignant because they continue to challenge the space that hosts them, albeit in a different way and for a different purpose.

Gilerman disagreed with Yedaya’s choice to appropriate the sculptures from the political sphere and to label them as art contrary to their maker’s will, but at the same time, she disagreed with Khatib when she found him to be a “true” artist. This contradiction cannot be solved – is not meant to be solved – but it can lead to question the axioms of the art discipline. The sculpture-objects are simultaneously already engaged and contemplative, and this is a contradiction only as long as we continue to separate aesthetics from politics. This is what makes them political, wherever they are, in the sense that Rancière gives this word. They do not only “presuppose the rupture of the ‘normal’ distribution of positions”, but also require “a rupture in the idea that there are dispositions ‘proper’ to such classifications.” They challenge the imposition of naturalized divisions and hierarchies between social identities, whether these relate to national subjectivities or to artistic categories.

To conclude, we have seen that the sculptural objects, created for the Bil’in demonstrations, contributed to the village’s steadfastness: the choice to employ art in the demonstrations brought about a rupture in the accepted “distribution of the sensible” in relation to the Palestinian popular struggle. In a different context the same objects disturbed another paradigm and ruptured customary classifications within the art world. In Rancière’s vein, these events are related inasmuch as the same objects brought about political occurrences that involved a reorganization of the senses. Reading the “Bil’in/Fence Art” case through Rancière, I propose that the attempt to separate politics from aesthetics is futile because the two notions are bound together from the outset. The attempt to fit the sculpture-objects into one category or another failed time and again, due to a resistance found in the objects themselves: these sculptures embody the fact that concepts, objects and meanings travel through time and space, and their significance never remains the same. Instead of delving into issues of propriety of voices and messages, or issues of exact meanings and definitions, it might be more interesting – and more constructive – to track the permutation of bodies whose potential lies in the constant challenge to clear delineations of our world.

_____________________________________________

• Gilerman, Dana. 2006 (Hebrew). “The Art of Struggle”. Haaretz, March 28, sec. Galeria. (http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/pages/ShArtPE.jhtml?itemNo=699551&contrassID=2&subContrassID=7&sbSubContrassID=0 )
• Guénoun, Solange and Kavanagh, James H. 2000. “Jacques Rancière: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement”. SubStance 29 (2): 3-24.
• Rancière, Jacques.1998. “The Cause of the Other”. Parallax 4 (2): 25-33.
• Rancière, Jacques. 2001. “Ten Theses on Politics”. Theory & Event 5 (3).
• Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum.
• Rancière, Jacques. 2005. Untitled statement. Panel discussion, at KLARTEXT! The Status of the Political in Contemporary Art and Culture, Berlin, Germany, January 16 (Available for download at http://klartext.uqbar-ev.de/services.html)
• Yisrael Palda. 2006. “Art in the Service of Politics”. Omedia, March 31. (http://www.omedia.co.il/Show_Article.asp?DynamicContentID=1242&MenuID=668)

Curators and organizers of exhibitions of Palestinian and Israeli political art in Europe will likely encounter two opposing positions concerning their responsibilities. The first is that there is no need to contextualize such works in a European country, even when they are exhibited in a society that was deeply implicated in the Shoah (as in the case of Austria). The art works will speak for themselves, and whatever entanglement there is between Israeli, Austrian, and Palestinian history is not qualitatively different from the entanglement that the histories of other countries also entail. According to this perspective, although many Austrians were implicated in the crimes committed by the Nazis half a century ago, this need not mean that the Austrians of today are incapable of seeing Israeli and Palestinian realities on their own terms. The second position presents Austrians and Austria as a society so deeply implicated in Nazi crimes that the exhibition of political art which deals with Jews in any way necessitates elaborate explanations on the history of Austrian antisemitism and the fate of Austria’s Jewry during the Second World War.

One of the aspects that cannot be changed is the fact that the artists are marked as Israeli or Palestinian. No matter what the title of the exhibition and how much effort the curators put into challenging preconceived categories, the “overlapping voices” will always be read as Israeli and Palestinian voices

The first option is difficult to sustain given that Austrian and Jewish history are not simply “entangled”. Rather, perceptions of Jews, Israelis, and Palestinians continue to be strongly conditioned by the images, debates, and sentiments that stem from Nazi rule in Austria. The idea of an Austrian nation gained acceptability in the post-war era when Austrians sought to dissociate themselves from allegedly German (that is non-Austrian) crimes. It would be disingenuous to claim that Austria – a nation state whose very existence is predicated on the disassociation from crimes against Jews – represents a neutral space for the representation of art that highlights the consequences of the foundation of a “Jewish state”. In a country like Austria and others with a history of strong Nazi or antisemitic sentiment, the discussion of guilt acquired by Israel and Israelis often becomes part of an attempt to deflect accusations that its citizens were implicated in the crimes of National Socialism. If the history of Nazism is not part of making such an exhibition site specific in large parts of Europe, what is?

Anisa Ashkar

The second position is much more sensitive to questions of site specificity but has its own pitfalls. This essay explores the possibility of a particular form of contextualization that is conscious of the limitations and dangers of creating ethically charged suggestions of perception for viewers. It will consider what sort of interventions actually create a space that allows for an engagement with the artists’ works and political message; even in a context that demands particular historical sensitivities. Although it explores the Holocaust and Israeli and Palestinian art specifically, the reflections pursued here might also apply in other contexts as well – for example, the way that the history of colonial relations and European Islamophobia colour the reception of political art from former North African and Middle Eastern colonies in different European countries today. Lastly, this piece should not be read as an explanation of the curators’ choices (which have been made according to their own considerations) but rather as an attempt to enter into dialogue with them and the other organizers of the exhibition.

Intervention and Explanation

The reception experience of the audience is conditioned not just by the arrangement of the exhibition space. It is shaped by many additional elements some of which can be controlled (such as the title of the exhibition) and others that cannot (such as the public identity of the producers and curators). One of the aspects that cannot be changed is the fact that the artists are marked as Israeli or Palestinian. No matter what the title of the exhibition and how much effort the curators put into challenging preconceived categories, the “overlapping voices” will always be read as Israeli and Palestinian voices.

There are two problems attached to this identification with a “side” in a conflict. The first is that the works could be seen as authentic voices or representative expressions of the feelings of one side. Since this is the issue that is usually and often addressed by critics and artists alike, I will not discuss it further. A second problem that has received much less attention is the fact that viewers with little knowledge of the political circumstances in the Middle East will focus on the pedagogical function of the works. They will mine them for basic information about political realities rather than read them as political commentaries.

BuytheWall.com, Yoav Weis

This is even true for projects that are not ostensibly trying to explain anything. Yoav Weiss’ project, which comments on the so-called separation wall in Israel, is a case in point. In his statement, Weiss notes that pieces of the Berlin Wall eventually sold for good money, once the structure lost its policing function. According to Weiss the Israeli wall will surely meet a similar fate and parts of it will soon become similarly coveted souvenirs. He thus offers a special deal for early birds who already want to secure their part of the wall.

In the Israeli context, Weiss’ work is an intervention. Interpretations of his work there are always predicated on the fact that the viewer already knows the Israeli wall and the reality it stands for. It should concern us less that individual viewers in Austria or elsewhere in Europe might miss the fact that Weiss is speaking tongue-in-cheek. More importantly, even those European viewers who understand this work as an ironic commentary will engage its references to the less familiar Israeli wall through the lens of the more familiar Berlin Wall. As careful Austrian viewers will scan his artwork with the aim of understanding the Israeli wall, its implications, and political meaning, they will inevitably do so through the prism of what they know about the Berlin Wall. Weiss’ work will to a large degree have an educational function to those unfamiliar with the history of the Israeli wall.

In short: the difference is that in Israel the artwork primarily intervenes into a context whereas in Austria it also explains. This raises the question: does the added pedagogical value that comes from transplanting political art and showing it in a collective exhibition abroad not demand that curators somehow engage with this level?

One way of resolving this issue might be the creation of a separate space that caters to the viewers’ desire to acquire information and learn about the context of the artwork on display. This is not an issue of explaining the individual works of art – of adding, for example, a sign that explains how we are supposed to read Weiss’ installation. Rather, a supplementary information section can unburden the work of art from its function as a medium of pedagogy, for which it is not well prepared. For the exhibition in the Essl Museum, information on such things as the history of the separation barrier being built by the state of Israel or a glossary can be found in a separate room – an approach that gives the works of art more space to develop their own autonomous language.

Information room the exhibition Overlapping Voices at the Essl Museum

At the same time, the disadvantage of such an arrangement is that the art and information sections can end up competing with each other. After all, information and background can hardly remain neutral. Both the pieces being exhibited and information sections do political work. There is no easy solution to this problem. At best, the information section should aim to explain the context of the different pieces of art in a reflexive manner by historically situating the political debates to which they refer. Rather than make overt political declarations on “the wall” being built, it should show the history of debates on the project, including the history of the terminology (between “apartheid wall”, “security barrier” and “separation fence”), and competing arguments about its legitimacy and consequences for the life of Palestinians and Israelis. The aim is neither to claim an apolitical form of objectivity nor to suggest that works of art should remain untouched by curatorial interventions so as to preserve their authenticity. The intent is rather to avoid reducing a work of art to a mere illustration of a programmatic statement made by others. What would be the point of showing a complex work such as Yoav Weiss’ if, next to it, there is a long declaration (or indeed a confession of political faith) by the curators on their opposition to the wall?

Strange Meanings, Strange Allies

A second set of problems arises when, rather than viewing a work of art as the point of departure for an explanation, viewers see it as an intervention – but one that addresses issues that would not occur to the intended Israeli or Palestinian viewer. At the core, the problem is that the political messages of the exhibited pieces were often not made to directly address an Austrian audience. Works such as Tal Adler’s documentation of unrecognized Bedouin villages might be interventions into multiple contexts. Adler certainly draws on languages that are as familiar to audiences in Tel Aviv as they are to viewers in London or Vienna. Yet, he is not trying to challenge current Austrian images of Israelis, Jews, Palestinians, and Bedouins that are informed by the Austrian history of collective anti-Jewish violence, the guilt discourses on complicity in genocide, and anti-Semitism.

For Israelis and Palestinians alike, it can serve as a testimony to the viability of a common struggle against the occupation. Yet, that need not be the way it is read in Austria. In Austria, the notion that curators and artists have been recruited equally from “both sides” can potentially reinforce the false sense that Austrians can constitute an uninvolved third party.

Indeed, even the choice of curators and the organization of the exhibition have different meanings in Austria than they do within Israeli and Palestinian society. The very act of choosing a Jewish Israeli and a Palestinian as curators, as well as showing the works of Palestinian and Israeli artists side by side, is a statement against those who oppose such alliance-building. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, it can serve as a testimony to the viability of a common struggle against the occupation. Yet, that need not be the way it is read in Austria. In Austria, the notion that curators and artists have been recruited equally from “both sides” can potentially reinforce the false sense that Austrians can constitute an uninvolved third party. Even if both curators share a particular vision of opposition to occupation, there is still the sense that the mere fact that both “identities” are present makes Austrians honest brokers; a role they are, as noted above, badly equipped to assume in this case.

The question is how an exhibition should account for the fact that Austrian media always deal with Israelis and thus also Palestinians through the lens of the Austrian past. Indeed, perhaps the metaphor of reading through a particular lens is too weak: the important issue is not one of misreading but of projection. Political art coming from Israel/Palestine can become an opportunity to negotiate historical issues that are not always referenced in any obvious manner. A recent discussion at an Israeli film festival organized in Vienna can serve as an illustration of this. After the screening of a movie about a love affair between two women in the Israeli army, the organizers offered an opportunity to discuss the work with the director. In the discussion an Austrian woman in the audience brought up the suicide of her grandfather after he fought for the German army, the Wehrmacht. In reaction another member of the audience accused her of being a “fascist”. Within minutes the discussion moved from a conversation on sexual identities in Israel to a polemical exchange on Austrian involvement in Nazi war crimes. The film was not misread. Instead it served as a mere occasion for another debate.

Unrecognized, Tal Adler

In the context detailed above, any engagement with Israeli policies – and particularly those involving human rights abuses such as those Tal Adler documents in his work on “unrecognized” Bedouin Villages – has the potential to become part of the renegotiation of a collective Austrian history as well as the family history of individual Austrians. Part of the argument for organizing the current exhibition on Palestinian and Israeli political art was that it is exciting to see how these debates function in Austria. Unfortunately, these circumstances also have the potential to impede a reception that allows for a nuanced perspective on Israeli and Palestinian politics and struggles. Working through questions of Austrian guilt and historical responsibility can also undermine the aim of attempts to move beyond simplistic narratives which reduce complex realities to an uncomplicated situation of perpetrators and victims in the Middle East.

What can it mean to think about such an exhibition politically in the Austrian context under these circumstances? Should there be an extra section and instructions to art educators on how to deal with the reflection of the Nazi past in pieces of art that never wanted to address that subject? Where does this leave Palestinian art, which is only part of this constellation indirectly? Rather than offer straightforward answers, this essay can make a number of concluding observations and suggestions:

1) Although we presuppose that the perception of Israel in Austria is strongly influenced by the history of European Jewry and the genocide against the European Jews, an exhibition about Israel is probably the least productive place to address the history of antisemitism. This is best done, rather, in museums that aim to suggest new ways in which visitors can think about difference in their own environment.1 The aim should be to offer a space for reflection on Austrian perceptions that allows visitors to understand the interventions of the artists, not to use works of art on Palestinian and Israeli politics and life in order to rethink Austrian history.

2) Furthermore, we can only presume that the history of Austrian anti-Semitism is relevant for the perception of visitors because the targeted viewers are assumed to be a native Austrians with no migration background and a family history that might implicate them in Nazi crimes. Yet, audiences for art exhibitions can come from diverse backgrounds, which would make it a dubious move on the side of the exhibition designers to suggest that there is any typical or ideal viewer. The “space for reflection” suggested above would thus be most useful when created by museum educators in dialogue with actual visitors.

3) It is commonly assumed by those organizing events on Israel or Palestine in Austria that a discussion was successful if nobody made any uncalled-for references to National Socialism. Clearly there is the danger that comparisons end up equating Nazi and Israeli policies. Naïve comparisons are not just inappropriate in the Austrian context; they are also problematic for Palestinian and Israeli political activism. They reduce Israeli and Palestinian voices to proxies for guilt discourses instead of engaging with the arguments they are making.

At the same time, I would suggest a less anxiety-ridden approach to the fact that the Israeli-Arab conflict and the occupation becomes a space for projection. Representations of violence and collective ethical transgression (even if they are only hinted at in an artwork) always lend themselves to multiple reinterpretations and demand to be appropriated by the viewer. It is futile and unproductive to try to instruct viewers beforehand about the proper forms of viewing art through an official statement. If educators with school classes were to try to forestall any comparisons between German Wehrmacht and Israeli soldiers by declaring such statements taboo, they would merely deaden any productive debate. The emancipatory potential of such an exhibition is not served by forcing on the viewer ethically charged rules on the proper reception of the works.

Bidoun, Manar Zuabi

In Austria, the interest in Palestinian and Israeli politics is always mediated through the Austrian past and the European past more generally. The most productive way to deal with this tendency is to take risks and see provocative, inappropriate, and embarrassing statements as an opportunity to offer new approaches to seeing Israelis and Palestinians. It is the work of curators to allow such debates and the work of museum educators to encourage them and make them productive – in dialogue with actual visitors, rather than imagined and stereotyped Austrians, the existence of whose prejudices we simply presume.

One way that museum educators can foster fruitful debates is to point out other models of reception; describing, for example, what type of reception a piece had or might have had or has already had in Israeli and/or Palestinian contexts. It is crucial to work with the fact that the pieces exhibited aim to challenge simplistic assumptions about identity, voice, or representation. This does not mean that there is not an ethics of reception. Guides should, for example, show their disapproval of inappropriate remarks. Nonetheless, the main aim should not be to reduce embarrassment but rather to use it.

———–

1. On museum pedagogy in this regard, see: Richard Sandell, “Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference

William Kentridge, «Felix in Exile», 1994 (Videostill)

William Kentridge’s works are overtly political; his entire oeuvre revolves around South Africa’s troubled history and torn identity. But as an affluent, educated, white male, can he really give a voice to the oppressed? The question has to do less with legitimacy (i.e. does he have a right to do so) and more with the inherent difficulties that accompany the attempt to represent the ‘other’. Can the act of representation avoid necessarily obliterating the  individual features of the “other”, and therefore implicitly patronizing him? And, can it be done while maintaining the tension that lies in the artist’s double role as a participant and an observer?

It is important to note that knowledge of an artists’ political agenda or the context of his works cannot resolve these issues. The fact that Kentridge was born in 1955 in South Africa to a family of German Jewish immigrants, who practiced law and were prominently active in the struggle against apartheid, may assure us that politically he is on the ‘right’ side, but not much else. The artist’s political persona, although indicative of his sincerity, can do little to explain or resolve the inherent distance between him, the work, and its subjects, in this case the silent black majority. Any attempt to appeal to the artist’s political agency as capable of bridging this distance culminates in mere apologetics.
Kentridge seems to be well aware of what is at stake, and he deals ingeniously with these problems in his film series “Drawings for Projections”, using a set of artistic and narrative devices he has developed.  These are meant foremost to highlight rather than resolve the double status (and double moral stance) of the artist as an observer who is also a participant in the tragedy of the Apartheid regime.

The “Drawings for Projection” series begins in 1989 with Johannesburg 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989, 35mm, 8′) and spans over a decade.  The works are shot in 16mm film, using a “primitive” stop-motion animation. Kentridge draws his image on wall-size sheets of paper, photographs them, and then alters the image, erasing and adding over the same sheet of paper. The drawings therefore bear the traces of erased images, allowing us to see, or believe we see, the artist’s continuous thought process and the passage of time. This technique -the static images that bear the presence of the passing time –  present a paradox that is most telling about Kentridge’s fascination with excavating the traces and marks of the past in the present moment.

Although the series was not created as a narrative sequence, according to Kentridge, in retrospect he realized that each independent film represents a different moment in the unfolding of the political history of South Africa. Indeed, watching the various films in the series in chronological order seems to create a subtle narrative, as an understanding of the recurrent themes and characters is gradually accumulated.

At the centre of most films are two characters: Soho Eckstien, a Real Estate developer, always depicted in a pinstripe suit, and Felix Taitelbaum, a dreamer, anarchist, and an artist, always portrayed naked. Both Felix and Soho physically resemble Kentridge himself (Felix from the beginning and Soho more and more so as the series progresses) and therefore each other.  Set against the background of the vast flat wasteland around Johannesburg, the films depict episodes from the lives of the two characters in which the public sphere, a locus for ecological and human disaster, is correlated with the inner worlds of the characters. In most episodes Soho is the one who sets things in motion, he is an entrepreneur in every sense.  Felix is having an affair with Mrs. Eckstein, Soho’s wife, but other than that he serves as a sensitive observer who is trapped in non involvement and impotence in the face of the atrocities.

The characters, who might be seen as standing  for the entire history of the European presence in South Africa, also represent a constant inner conflict (as well as an external class struggle) which becomes literal in Johannesburg 2nd greatest city after Paris. This film ends with a scene in which Soho and Felix rising above the horizon, clashing in a struggle depicted in mythical terms. The outcome of this struggle, however, does not seem to alter the situation much, as convoys of disillusioned blacks crossing the flat land indifferent to the battle.

Aware of the problem of speaking in the name of the oppressed, Kentridge turns to self reflection as the only morally adequate way of dealing with the reality that surrounds him. When he gazes inwardly, the wasteland around Johannesburg turns into an internal landscape, a setting for an unresolved and soul-splitting conflict.
This, however, is much more than a mere allegory of an internal struggle. The spilt between the two characters which were created in Kentridge’s image and yet are not identical to him (he is neither nor the two together) enables him to point out that art can occupy a stance in which it is both part of the story and yet at the same time far
removed from it. This ambivalence, he seems to claim, is not something that can be resolved, only be brought into awareness. Therefore, for Kentridge, pointing out the moral dilemma involved in the participant-observer stance – becomes itself a moral goal.

In Felix in Exile (1994, 35mm film 8′43″) we find Felix alone in a bleak hotel room in Paris. His sole possession is a suitcase filled with empty papers, and his uneasiness and sorrow are prevalent. As he attempts to shave, his reflection in the mirror is erased and the image of an African woman, Nandy, appears instead. She hands him images she has drawn, and the room is soon flooded with a wave of pages with her drawings of murdered people (the film was made in 1994, after the first post apartheid election, and the images are of victims of the massive killing that took place right before that).

The picture of South Africa that appears in Felix in Exile are heavily mediated- they are presented in a world of reflections, of drawings of photographs, of second and third order representations. This emphasis on visual mediation was interpreted as linked to the heavy censorship during the apartheid regime (for instance, during the 80’s all images of violence or public disturbance were banned from public view), however, it can also be seen as a commentary on the role of the viewer. As the film unfolds, we, the viewers of the film, are exposed to the harsh images at exactly the same moment when Felix sees them, and as such we become witnesses as well. By equating our experience with Felix’s, Kentridge places us all in the same position which is marked by the impossibility of having a pre-mediated, ‘original’ image. Felix’s physical displacement becomes a metaphor for an internal exile, in which one can never be at home, if that means having an intermediate direct contact with reality. Under such circumstances the idea that art has a privileged access to reality in which the artists is capable of conveying the ‘real’ voice of the oppressed, seems unfounded. In this light Kentridge, rather than handing us a recollection of facts, is commenting on how our memory and vision operate, and makes us come to terms with our inability to have one truth, as long as we remain well aware of it.

A further inquiry into the role of visual mediation underlies Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint, (1996, 35mm film 5′ 50″) in which Soho is lying in a hospital bed in a coma, surrounded by ten identical doctors who look like him. As the medical treatment is to no avail and they carry him to do an MRI scan for diagnosis. There, we practically enter Soho’s body and see ‘what goes on in his mind’, as the MRI images are transformed into a road map. We follow Soho driving through these inner roads (here again Kentrdige’s almost obsessive engagement with reflections becomes apparent, as all we see is mediated through mirrors, windows, etc) the journey ends abruptly when a pedestrian hits the car’s front window. His horrified face stares at Soho who wakes up all of a sudden in the hospital bed.

The film was made during the establishment of the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” which attempted to come to terms with the horrors of the past by organizing events, of an almost religious type, in which both the oppressors
would confess in front of their victims, and would gain their forgiveness and the amnesty of the state.
Here the visual mediation of the MRI serves Kentridge to comment on the role of representation in art and life and about the relationship between the individual and the communal responsibility for South Africa’s recent past. The fact that the knowledge required for the healing of the body is not given through the body itself but through its representation points out the power of visual mediation to convey a deeper, hidden, truth. Just as the recovery of the past is possible only through its subjective representation in the minds of the victims and oppressor, it is only via a representation of Soho’s own experience- induced by a community of healers – that enables him to regain consciousness. In this representation, however, the MRI scan is not readily readable and needs its interpreters and mediators, in this case, the artist itself.

Kentridge’s poetic yet highly political works succeed in commenting on
the situation in South Africa and at the same time has a bearing outside his immediate political context. By placing the personal in the forefront while the political seems to stay in the background, he manages to create a calculated illusion that the latter are merely coincidental and marginal. However, a closer look reveals the political to be the catalyst of all events, and inseparable form the personal. As the characters motives and interaction replicate the portrayed events, the personal becomes a reflection on the political and vice versa.

These issues are taken up, as demonstrated perfectly by his animation technique, through a thematic engagement with the play of memory and time and an investigation into the nature of art and representation. Kentridge, it seems, aims to place the artist’s point of view on the same level as that of the audience viewing the work, pointing out the necessary mediation and distortion inherent in any act of communication and representation. Political art, he seems to argue, does not offer a view from nowhere, immune from the biases and short sightedness of its audience. Its importance lies not in the pretence to convey certain realties, but in its being an inquiry, its ability to send both the artist and his audience into a process of self-questioning. Paradoxically, by manipulating his own images and turning the political engagement into a soul searching quest, Kentridge manages to avoid forcing his own vantage point as superior. Without overshadowing and obliterating the other, his artistic search and voice comes across as both sincere and legitimate.

____________________________________

• Dan Cameron, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, J.M. Coetzee. William Kentridge: Phaidon, , c1999.
• Danto, Arthur C. Unnatural Wonders : Essays from the Gap between Art and Life: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, , 2005.
• Godby, Michael. “William Kentridge: Retrospective.” Art Journal (1999): 75-85.
• Krauss, Rosalind  “The Rock”: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection  ” October  Vol. 92 pp. 3-35
• Maltz, Leora. “The Rock in the Landscape: William Kentridge, J.H. Pierneef and the Geological Landscape.” Harvard, 2006.
• Kentridge, William. “Kentridge Interview by Toni Bryan” 2004.

Schleuser.net, is the abbreviation and the internet-domain of the German “Federal Trade Association for Undocumented Traveling” – called “Bundesverband Schleppen & Schleusen”. It is a pressure group lobbying commercial enterprises active in the market segment of undocumented transborder traffic.

Schleuser.net was set to satisfy the need to present systematic background data on migrant mobility to the general public and to lobby for mobility interests in the economic sphere, but also in the realm of human rights, which are the forceful basis for all endeavors in a free society and the free market.

In a global world the freedom of trade and the freedom of movement, the right of unrestricted mobility and labor is a sine qua non for global wealth. States which administrate old fashioned borders like walls, mine fields, passport control or digital traffic surveillance are late for the future. Deregulation of border regime is an urgent issue for the rising up of a free world etc.

Schleuser.net was founded 1998 by a group of activists and artists. For about 10 years the artists Manuela Unverdorben, Farida Heuck and I – the Communication Staff, along with artists or activists who joined the group occasionally, lobbied for undocumented mobility.

A group of artists fakes up an economic sphere association, which deals with PR and politics, but is using fine arts sponsoring to reach strategic goals

The group’s understanding of border crossing and transgression was not limited to immigration or emigration, but also seen as a method which can be used to explore the possibilities of transfer and cooperation between art, science and political activism. Therefore examining Schleuser.net one needs to ask which voice is speaking for whom and for what reason? Did Schleuser.net speak for traffickers, for smugglers, for the so called”coyotes”, for (neo) liberal entrepreneurs and money makers? Or did Schleuser.net speak for migrants, for stowaways or boat people?

Schleuser.net took all the symbolism attached to border crossing, and extending this into the appropriation of hegemonic strategies, whether neo-liberalism’s jargon and patterns of thinking, or belief in the lobby policy of internationalist “scenes”. However Schleuser.net was not an NGO plunging in where state agencies cannot reach, nor a group of artists bent on accumulating cultural capital. It was a working platform, working together with activist and experts, using a division of tasks, that applies to specific campaigns into which the association’s know-how, or at least its point of view constitutes productive input, for creating the prerequisites for joint action, and generating knowledge.

The Federal Trade Association for Undocumented Traveling – Schleuser.net, adapted the conventional organizational structures of pressure groups. More than symbolic, it is a direct starting-point of practical procedure. For example, Schleuser.net organized conferences and general meetings. As to be expected from a responsible corporation, Schleuser.net also supports fine arts.
To make it short: A group of artists fakes up an economic sphere association, which deals with PR and politics, but is using fine arts sponsoring to reach strategic goals.

One concrete example of this is the International People Smugglers’ Convention that was held for the first time in Graz, Austria. The convention brought together academics, artists and curators, so that they could acquaint themselves with different approaches.

Another concrete example is Schleuser.net’s project “transit~waves”, a small FM radio station for a commuter’s traffic downtown tunnel. The public art piece dealt with the metaphoric of tunnels in general and its links to invisibility, illegality, undocumented traffic and urban (non)-identity. The broadcast was programs on migration and undocumented traveling.

The current turn of governance from politics to marketing, from bottom-up to top down strategies shuffles the state administrations more and more in the field formerly inspirited by cultural producers like religion, independent media, advertisement, art and technology. Nowadays new public images are launched by state agencies trying to fix them indelibly in the minds of the citizens and to accompany or to catch the decision makers’ attention.

A good example is the IOM, the International Organization of Migration; The IOM is an intergovernmental organization for migration management and European migration control. The IOM launched some so called counter-trafficking campaigns in Eastern Europe. There is a brilliant overview and analysis by Rutvica Andrijasevic, given in her article “beautiful dead bodies – gender, migration and representation in anti-trafficking campaigns” In the article she addresses the link between sex trafficking and European citizenship by examining several anti-trafficking campaigns launched in post-socialist Europe. In illustrating which techniques are used in the production of images, she points to the highly symbolic and stereotypical constructions of femininity (victims) and masculinity (criminals) of eastern European nationals.Another example is a press release by German Border Police in 2005. The official statement on cruel facilitators of illegal entry over Germany’s Eastern border was vouched by a photography called “The woman in the glove compartment” which was originally shot and issued years before in the United States.

As an artistic enterprise, schleuser.net’s subject matter was primarily based on those public images generated by state administrations and the intentional or unintentional underlying concepts called cultural grammar. The group used them, placed them under analysis by a joyous, but not cynical positive affirmation, and presented them anew. The backbone of their projects and actions was the questioning of public spaces, asking who the respective public is, who defines the borders of this space, and last but not least: Who can stay in (and why)?

The declared objective of schleuser.net was to serve as representatives of businesses that are active in the market segment of undocumented, transborder passenger transportation and give them a voice, just that, nothing more. The Federal Trade Association for Undocumented Traveling neither had organized migrants nor had demanded their representativity, nor schleuser.net had tended a relief organization or had let alone demand attention through victimization or fateful biographies, nor had ever organized traffickers or any coyote, because that is forbidden by law. There is a wide spread of membership but only nominal Members can be found.

Nevertheless, schleuser.net’s intention was to question the consolidation of a tacit consensus whereby the freedom of thought is given space or where the reflexive option is left open. Using culture jamming techniques to shake the cultural grammar, the art group made an own world, a utopian moment, which gave us the chance to see more than normalcy.

***

Probably at this point I should expand on European context in which we have intervened.

On the one side: After WWII and the Shoa, granting refugees asylum was seen as a human right. During the Cold War the business of aiding and facilitating an escape to the so called Free World was an indictable offense in Eastern European States, but in the Western countries it was a free and regular conducted trade, and even considered a brave deed.

Conservatives warned of the flight into Germany’s welfare systems, (the right wings on mixing the race), and leftists fought for refugees, escaping of imperialism or tyranny. Both prolonged the idea that the reason to go, constitutes the right to come. In that context the best reason to go is to be a victim

After the Cold War and since Germany’s reunification Europe’s administrations have been acting to dissolve the human right of asylum and the Freedom of Movement, in the national governmental jargon called: ”Budapest Proceeding”. One of their top-down means is to criminalize the profession of aiding an escape throughout Europe by reinvention of terms and images, thus aiming to punish activities designed to foster non-documented transborder traveling or the freedom of movement.

On the second side: Contextualized on those experiences of WWII and the Shoa, in West and East Germany, for decades, migration was ruled in terms of flight and exile. Hired Migrant laborers from abroad were just called guests. The displacement or relocation of German speaking people from Eastern Europe was embedded in nation building: They were identified as Germans. Both groups were not seen as migrants. The term migration meant only transmigration (of Germans), not immigration to Germany. In nineties, when autonomous migration was clearly evident, the public debate was still focusing flight and exile. Conservatives warned of the flight into Germany’s welfare systems, (the right wings on mixing the race), and leftists fought for refugees, escaping of imperialism or tyranny. Both prolonged the idea that the reason to go, constitutes the right to come. In that context the best reason to go is to be a victim.

On the third side: In the wake of a new European migration management installation, terms and images drawn from Nazi propaganda where being dusted off by politicians and mass media searching a language everybody can understand and so being re-introduced into public debate in order to generate contexts of legitimization.

For instance the slogan “Our boat is full” refers on German Reich’s pitch of German overpopulation. Or for instance, the conservative fight against the “carnet de vogages”, an insurance originally issued by Swiss, Austrian or German automobile associations to make traveling to Schengen area easier for Ukrainians and other non-EU East Europeans referred on cut and dried opinions known from the thirties and forties. The Neo-Nazi Slogan of the eighties “Work first for Germans” became part of the labor regulation and re-introduced ideas of ethnic hierarchy, instead of social mobility or discussions about the condition of Globalization. Trade Unions on construction sites changed to national units collaborating with border police and customs to fight against workers without permits, instead organizing them for better wages and conditions.

On the other side, Joseph Goebbels war propaganda term “Fortress Europe” is nowadays re-introduced to describe EU’s border policies and to contrive not only the idea of lockable borderlines, but also the idea of a static and homogeneous European territory. The Schengen-Agreement implemented the borderline throughout the territory: Border Control is deep inside the states, especially at commuters’ transit points. Even taxi drivers should control if any passenger is German, a EU-Citizen or a foreigner, a feasible ruling only by controlling the “wrong face”. A policeman said about his traffic control experience: “A white driver with a black man on the backseat is suspicious, a black driver with a white man is o.k.” The public sphere is thus being eroded, and the public space in physical terms radically re-structured.

And there is a fourth side: When 1997 at Documenta X’s Hybrid Workspace, artists and activists initiated the campaign “no-one-is-illegal” , the difference between the French and German situation became quite obvious: Squatting the church St. Bernard, French “sans papiers” , who fought for their rights, self organized themselves through their common social and political situation. In contrast, in Germany the few migrants run organizations were established along their cultural or national identities, mirroring a German society which is also staunched to have one own.

That fact made it easy to foster a racist border regime which refuse basic dignity and human rights and set up debates on ethnicity. (when schleuser.net made 2006 a piece for Zurich art space Shedhalle, researching the piece we learned, that in French West Switzerland a network of migrants run organizations provide support for everyday life, in German East Switzerland institutions, e. g. Trade Unions, act as backers or patrons.)

So when schleuser.net was founded in 1998 we searched for breaking with those contexts, and to search for and create an applicable symbolic representation without pursuing images of victimization and identity politics.

To make it clear I will give an oppositional example: Some years ago, French artist group Claire Fontaine published a text-piece, stating that everyone who fights for the rights of migrants is a migrant in its own country. The piece maintained what is sometimes called “radical chic”. The phrase refers to Tom Wolfe’s eponymous essay describing the adoption of radical causes by members of the wealthy high-society and celebrity class. That “radical chic” ignores racist, sexist, capitalistic or any other construction of power and lordship in society and your own performance to create that normalcy. “Radical chic” is like a benefit performance of a white male philharmonic orchestra held for   non-white, female, poor – instead of self questioning why the orchestra is exclusively white and male. “Radical chic” refers on the idea, that there is a safe place to be a good person in a bad world; it’s a radical slogan fighting for the rights of rickshaws drivers sprayed by yourself on your own Rolls Royce. But Claire Fontaine’s text is an art piece, so maybe it is important to stage “chic” in achieving art market attention and giving the privileged art hall and gallery audience the chance to change their charity in radical attitude (and probably a helpful donation).

On the other hand, as an art piece, the text is open enough to read also, that ‘everyone’ includes every migrant who fights for its rights is getting part of that society, makes it to its ‘own’ in changing the conditions and creating a new one. – However, when I read Claire Fontaine’s text literally I get a creepy view on solidarity and politics: The statement ascribes migration only to non-citizens without the right to have rights and thus blankets the differences in global mobility. The statement offers the plot that a member of the privileged population, living like a bee in clover as Frantz Fanon mentioned, could get rid of itself by over-identification and so change to the good side. The concept of identity is pinnacled to the bourgeois deal: do ut des.

Solidarity is different: It expects no service in return, even no good place in paradise or any other membership awards. This is the basic political paradox: (Probably) doing the right thing, but poising at the wrong side.

***

Schleuser.net’s concept tried to create a space which is not safe, but also not splitting up people in the good and the bad guys, like the good refugees, but bad boat people in the Mediterranean, bad traffickers, but good border guards fighting them, or the good airlines and the bad European tourists looking for cheap brothels in abroad, or the good radical fighter and the bad guy who earn a lot of money exploiting that fight etc. Everybody can be good and bad and both together, but not ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’. The concept of schleuser.net, deals with the problems of representation, trying to show the manifest border as a small mirror for all those images and identities which let the current world go round – and you (and we) in this mirror always see ourself proceeding the normalcy of border regime.

Schleuser.net was especially suitable for reflecting migration not through the representing of migrants, but researching militantly migration issues. Similar to the car manufacturing industry’s federal trade association, who do not represent the interests of car drivers but demand more motorways and cheap taxes only for their own purposes, schleuser.net didn’t inquire into a person’s reasons for making a journey. This becomes all the more important as governmental agencies wish to place travel in some rational context, projected as moral, utilitarian or culturally racist – depending on how the greatest acceptance by society for repression and regulation can be achieved.

It is just these figments of the imagination that schleuser.net took up, in reflexively addressing the audience that artists can reach. Schleuser.nets interest was not to reach some “alternative” element of the general public or to define a target group, but preferring tactical communication with those who were accessible in the given situation.

This can be done, for example, by the appropriation of the hegemonic symbolism in each case, so as to attain an equidistant, vague, equivocal, yet all the more productive attitude, on the basis of which the daily idiocy of border management can be questioned and recognized. This is essential in that the cliché of border criminals active globally and organized in a mafia is also being accepted in circles that tend to see themselves as critical, liberal and also cultivated like the art world. On this, schleuser.net would draw attention to the image transfer affected by the global migration regime, for example by outing undocumented cross-border traffic in the same context as terrorism, slavery, prostitution.

For example, in running “transit~waves” project, schleuser.net assumed that migration is autonomous, or in other words that each person decides individually as to why he/she wants to go from point A to point B, to use passage C or to cross border D. Every ABCD of travel and movement is as a matter of course laden with connotations, whether these consist of poverty, terrorism, war, crime, denial, utopia, yearning, resentments, joie de vivre, sickness, gaining distinction, making sense, etc.

Aside from those realities, just such connotations exercise influence in the political sphere. schleuser.net’s concept was focusing that symbolic charging if it generated outcomes that took the form of force or administration and most especially, when they was pursed precisely in order to achieve such outcomes. schleuser.net was and now schleuser.net’s archive is not interested in being a voice, but in reasoning whose speech is claiming or re-arming borders, to give the slot a chance.

(schleuser.net archive / 2009)

But let us begin with a few preliminary remarks on the concept of “voice,” and in particular the distinction between two senses in which the term appears in two different contexts of discussion. First there is a common discourse in which the term “voice” is treated as the enabling condition for self-representation in the public sphere, the condition enabling any demand for recognition as well as the realization of one’s rights. As in the elections, having a voice means participating in the global count. If you lack a voice, you’re simply not counted: your presence cannot be publicly registered. And this is in fact how we ordinarily use the word: letting your voice be heard means expressing a stance – the very fact of having a stance – thus transforming the social field, making a difference. In this sense, one’s voice is a token of one’s membership in public discourse and, as such, the voice is typically discussed when focusing on classes, groups or individuals whose voice is suppressed, who are silenced by the social-political system. This context of discussion also serves as the characteristic background for writing on graffiti and Street Art.

The act of graffiti is typically understood in terms of a struggle to make one’s voice heard in the public sphere, a confrontation with the predominant social deafness that bars the street artist from recognizing his or her voice as part of that sphere. The act of graffiti – e.g., bombing – is an attack on those “walls of silence” that signify the exclusion of “bombers” from legitimate spheres of expression. In this respect, the act of signing one’s name, graffiti’s ur-form, the signature appearing on a wall, a telephone booth or on a subway car, is not a mode of self-expression, but is, first and foremost, an act of self-assertion, self-positioning and thus a marking – indeed, often an aggressive, antagonistic demarcation – of one’s territory within public space.

Graffiti is often conceived of as vandalism or as an act of violence, precisely because it stems from that basic feeing of silencing and voiceless-ness. Urban graffiti was born of feelings of deep alienation toward the prevailing symbolical order and, moreover, of a simultaneous refusal to adhere to that alienation. Graffiti grows out of an unremitting demand to be reflected in the public “mirror”. And, as graffiti creators demand to see their reflection in that mirror, they take action which necessarily calls for a destabilization, a disruption, of the given order of things: the order of private and public property, the order of the Law – which embodies the exclusion of the “bomber’s” voice. As such, graffiti may be understood as speaking in a twofold manner: on the one hand, its voice addresses the inner circle of graffiti artists – a community that can decipher and genuinely appreciate the value, novelty and achievement of new graffiti; on the other hand, it provocatively addresses an indifferent public sphere where the voice has little or no chance of reverberating. In this sense, what the graffiti voice “says” is “like it or not, here I am!”, or “here I am, for your eyes are compelled to acknowledge me”.

But the discussion of the meaning of the voice is developed in yet another philosophical context, where the dialectics of self-assertion and public recognition is less central. Here, the phenomenon of voice opens itself up to a different kind of questioning, one that focuses rather on a dimension of the voice that in principle evades the public and is thus never tied to any given order of discourse. I believe that this somewhat unique philosophical context ultimately offers a more fruitful perspective for thinking about Klone’s melancholic predators, whose enigmatic appearance is not only tied to the fact that they have arrived in town from some unknown “outside”, but also to the fact that what they demand from their viewer remains completely unclear.

In contemporary philosophy – from Jacques Derrida to Jean-Luc Nancy, from Luce Irigaray to Julia Kristeva and from Stanley Cavell to Adriana Cavarero – there is an interesting discussion of the human voice as that which embodies the singularity and irreplaceability of the speaking subject. In this context, the voice of the other person is not the statement, the stance or position through which an individual appears in public, but a dimension of the individual that cannot be articulated and is fundamentally incommunicable within the meaningfulness of a public language. Voice is not only a vehicle for conveying possible “content” but is the expression of the uniqueness – the idiosyncrasy, the otherness – of the person speaking to us; and as such the other’s voice is not what we can comprehend in his or her speech but that which ultimately remains alien and external to our logic.

In the Blue Octavo Notebooks, Franz Kafka makes use of a voice-metaphor which might prove relevant for elaborating this point. He writes:

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Kafka uses this small parable to toy with a traditional analogy between the structure of the human subject and the structure of a room, an enclosed inner space in which our mental life plays itself out. Kafka is ironical about this analogy, and yet he nevertheless uses the image of the room to point to a unique dimension of the subject, a dimension which in my view calls for proper attention in spite of – or perhaps just because – the structure of the modern subject has already been dismantled. What Kafka points to is that the singularity of the Other always evades the seemingly coherent organizing structure of the Self. This singularity, which makes each and every one of us what we are, echoes as the other person walks past us – and is embodied, according to Kafka, in a very particular kind of voice: not a clear, distinguishable one; not one with an internal logic subjected to the other’s intentions, aims and stances; but rather the voice, the sound, of a coincidental screech – a rattling – of a mirror that is poorly-fastened to the wall.

According to Kafka, we can – and perhaps we even should – make an effort and listen to that idiosyncratic screech which echoes the unattainable singularity of the Other. And here, precisely, a whole set of interesting questions open up, questions pertaining to the nature of that content-less sound, as well as to our ability – and obligation – to listen. What would listening mean – listening to this unintelligible but unique voice, which is neither pleasant nor even clear to us?

The unofficial, idiosyncratic voice of the Other may be approached and reflected on in a variety of philosophical modes. For our purposes, I think that the work of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas offers a uniquely interesting perspective. Levinas is known as a philosopher who develops an ethics whose starting point is a new critical understanding of the concept of the Other. Levinasian ethics stem from a criticism of the manner in which the Western philosophical tradition privileges the Self, the ego, the I, as its point of departure. Instead of criticizing the banal patterns by which the self has become a dominant institution, Western philosophy, according to Levinas, has internalized selfhood as its guiding principle. And in so doing, in the tradition ultimately reproduces a kind of obtuseness or deafness toward the disturbing presence of a radical otherness which is always already there, between us: the otherness of the Other person.

Someone, a person, addresses us; she takes the liberty of speaking to us, but she may just as well be silent or just about to become silent in our presence, and we … we are used to all that… we know how to look back, how to listen and respond. We know where to place what we see and understand, what we are told; and yet, we still nevertheless often remain blind and deaf to a fundamental dimension of the other, one which always eludes the frames of reference created by our seeing and listening.: what typically eludes us is the very presence of the person who approaches us – the “who” so different from the “what” – the singular, irreplaceable presence of an “outside,” that turns toward us, a call whose origin remains inaccessible.

In his writings, Levinas searches for ways of speaking about the manner in which such a radical “outside” -the transcendent or the Infinite – may nevertheless echo in our daily lives. For Levinas, it is clear that the Other cannot be conceptualized by the ego and yet, he insists that that the Other’s transcendence is nevertheless completely integral to our lives. Hence, if one only knows how to look – or, as in Kafka, if one knows how to listen – then one allows for the revelation of this radical otherness within the very heart of the here-and-now: that which cannot be formulated in words makes itself heard and the invisible shows itself as such. But where does this all happen? If we are to ask Levinas, this would be at what is simultaneously nearest and farthest away from us: this very moment, at dinner, when a pizza deliveryman knocks at the door. Or, before that, a man on the other side of the sidewalk, then at the grocer’s, a woman buying ice cream for her daughter, when we greet another person and when we don’t. The gleam of transcendence appears in “the face of the Other”.

Levinas’s choice of the human face as an image for that which embodies the transgression of the known public sphere is anything but self-evident, and has indeed attracted no little criticism. Why is it the face, for Levinas, that which reveals the radical alterity of the Other? In what way can the Other’s face be said to evade the sphere of the Ego? In what way, according to Levinas, does “the gleam of the Infinite” show itself in the human face? Isn’t the human face precisely that which necessarily appears to the consciousness of a specific viewer and hence is always already a given content whose features are derived from a common familiar lexicon (i.e., large head, small forehead, hooked nose, sexy face, spiritual face, cunning face, happy face, depressed face, dark of glistening eyes, Marilyn Monroe or Tony Sporano, Obama, Netanyahu or Hassan Nassrallah)? Does the face not always already belong to a matrix of given public meanings?

To begin with, the answer is a resounding “yes”; the face of the Other always appears within a social-cultural-political context, within certain conventions and taxonomic systems that are often tied to domination, the abuse of power, discrimination and injustice. In Israeli society, for example, we immediately recognize “the face of a Palestinian”, “the face of a settler”, “the face of a migrant worker”, “the face of a mizrahi man”, or “the face of a Russian woman”. We are indeed so used to meeting “tagged” faces that we don’t really know how to look at a face without the use of given social-cultural-political categories. This, however, is precisely where Levinas’s critique begins. Can we break away from the habitual patterns of our seeing and discover the freedom and the responsibility we have vis-à-vis our own gaze? What kind of responsibility do we have in facing the other? Can we refuse to participate in the manner in which our gaze so typically reifies the other’s face? What would such a refusal mean? These are precisely the Levinasian questions: can we encounter the face of the Other without subjecting it to the rule of “the same”?

According to Levinas, the possibility of encountering the alterity or otherness of the Other is neither a given nor an easy option, but one that demands a radical transformation of central aspects of the self (of the institution of selfhood) and, in particular, a transformation in our characteristic ways of looking and seeing, of listening and hearing. In this context, the first thing Levinas underscores is the need to resist the idea that the Other’s face (or voice) is “something” (an object, an image) which is simply “there” in front of us, waiting for our proper attention. Levinas differs here from Kafka, for whom the Other’s voice is located in its own identity and which is situated within the confines of that subjective room. Despite its evasiveness, the nucleus of Kafka’s voice is all there – beyond the subject’s image (the mirror) – reverberating a very specific quality (its screech), which gives itself up to the sense of sound “when everything round about is quiet”. The voice itself is given us only if we manage to create good conditions for listening. This is not the case with Levinas. For him, the face is exactly that which never gives itself up, and which will never be given to us as itself. The face’s “presence”, Levinas writes “consists in coming toward us, in making an entry…the epiphany of the face is a visitation”. What exactly does that mean?

In my book Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as an Optics I suggest thinking about Levinas’ face as a sort of event or a happening. This can in fact be derived from the word’s declination – face, to face, facing (in Hebrew panim – pana – pniya). The face’s unique presence does not derive, therefore, from its visual characteristic, but rather from its act of facing. The essence of the face lies, according to Levinas, in the very event of facing or addressing. Addressing whom? An “I”, an ego, a self. The face is a one-directional vector whose presence in the space between you and I opens up the possibility of sense in the first place. It is the event which endows the space between us with meaningfulness, a meaning based on the primordial presence of the other person, which is there, facing me, before his having said or done anything specific.

Hence, when we sit now at two ends of the table, I cannot say where your face is located since the word “location” does not apply here at all. Your face, in the Levinasian sense, can never belong to the frame of a camera; it is not something which has its “place” in the room. And that is because the face is never simply “there”, say around the nose or in the front of a head resting against the wall. For Levinas, the human face should not be understood as an object that occupies, in its mass, a given space. Instead, the face should be seen as a unique kind of motion toward the self, an entry into the self’s living space, a visitation, sometimes a trespassing, of the sphere of selfhood. And in this sense, the face is not what appears to me when I bother to look, but rather an appellation already directed at me, befalling me so to speak, calling out to me and making me responsible for that which stands before me, regardless of what is said (or what I understand of that which has been said) between us. “The face”, writes Levinas, “imposes itself on me without me being able to be deaf to its call or to forget it; that is, without me being able to stop holding myself responsible for its distress”. The Other’s face is a form of speaking, a “wordless” call which is nonetheless absolutely binding:

[f]or here no one can be substituted for me; in calling upon me [...] it obliges me as someone irreplaceable and unique, someone chosen. Inasmuch as it calls upon my responsibility, it forbids me any replacement. Irreplaceable in responsibility, I cannot, without defaulting, [...] escape the face of a neighbor; here I am pledged to the other without being able to take back my pledge.

In a corollary manner, the voice of the Other, reverberating in the singular, idiosyncratic way that concerns us here, should not simply be understood as a subjective quality that might easily escape us, but rather as the epiphany of an alterity that disrupts our daily routines governed by the sphere of the ego. The voice of the other reveals the sense in which the “I” is primarily a relational structure of response. In other words, the very form of otherness – embodied in his or her voice – is the ethical imperative; that is, the reverberation of the other’s voice is inseparable from the revelation of the fact that one’s responsibility toward the Other is internal to one’s subjectivity. And in it is in this intersection that, according to Levinas, “the resonance of silence – Gelaut der Stille – certainly sounds.”

How does all this relate to street art and to Klone’s images?
First, Klone’s faces are never simply “there”; their presence is not a “given”. They appear, rather, showing themselves in the city; cropping up unexpectedly around a corner, transforming the familiarity of the ordinary without asking anyone for permission, furthermore never negotiating their presence with the interests of viewers. Klone’s creatures face you. They turn to you much before you have decided how to look at them or whether you wish to see them at all (this holds true for street art in general). The Klones typically face you more clearly if you actually walk the streets of the city, but in any case they always show themselves – and sometimes hide themselves – in a manner that unfolds within the horizons of city life, traffic, construction-work, renovations, demonstrations, good or bad weather and of course via one’s ways of moving around the city, always dependent on the route you have chosen on a given day, on your specific rhythm and on the contingent paths chosen by the urban gaze.

Furthermore, being in-the-street, Klone’s faces usually appear with sunrise and often turn to shadows at night. It all depends on whether or not there is a street light nearby or perhaps an old neon shining from a neighbor’s terrace. They thus appear just as they disappear: suddenly, with no prior notice: after the rain; erased by an unhappy shop owner or when the Municipality sends its workers to paint a certain wall anew, preparing it for some election propaganda.

Klone’s human animals always appear as part of a dynamic situation. They often interact with preexisting images or graffiti which, in themselves, have the tendency to appear in multiplicity, in accumulation: like electromagnetic clouds or, alternatively, the animals painted layer upon layer in prehistoric cave painting, such as the ones, for example, in Chauvet.

For Georges Bataille, the fact that in cave painting one commonly finds areas that are so crowded with images – and images upon images – serves as evidence of a general interpretation of the significance of these primordial works. For him, the multiplicity and superimposition of images shows well that for early cave painters, the essence of painting was not so much the created image as much as the very act of painting (image as object versus image as mark of act/event). This intuition might be fruitful when we turn to think of street art, but we won’t develop it here. For our purposes, suffice it to say that as if aware of the fate of those images around them, Klone’s animals also seem to know that they are bound to disappear one day. Is their melancholy tied perhaps to this awareness of their own fragility and finitude? Do they look at us with eyes that see their end coming? Or perhaps it is our end that they see?

Let’s turn to consider the images themselves, and first let us notice that whereas these human animals are indeed always already part of the urban “texture,” their appearance lacks any clear context; these faces are neither integral to the city itself nor clearly belong there. They come from “outside”; they are outsiders who have arrived here from a place that lies beyond the horizons of a specific time and place. These figures cannot be classified easily precisely because their self-presentation involves a set of irresolvable tensions such as the tension between animal and human, between predator and prey, good and evil, ordinary and extraterrestrial, contemporary and mythological. Who are these large-fanged predators? And what is this sadness – and sometimes tenderness – that twinkles in their eyes? Do Klone’s animals bear a family resemblance to Fenrir, the monstrous wolf of Norse mythology, or rather to Spielberg’s ET?

In conversation, Klone speaks of predators and the relationship between their existence in nature and human urban existence. He values the kind of precision that predators have. Unlike the manner in which predators limit themselves to satisfying their basic needs, city people can never be satiated. What is a predator doing in the city in which it so clearly doesn’t belong? The Klone figure is a stranger. Its strangeness is its very form of appearance. And yet, despite the enigmatic character of its identity, the Klone appears with clarity: the clarity of simply being-here, participating – albeit in an unfamiliar manner – in the city’s life.

Yet at the same time Klone’s faces are not simply there as objects or self-enclosed images; they are present, rather, in the very event of “turning toward,” us, in the manner they face and address us. Klone’s figures look at us. They might appear full bodied or only showing their face. They can be encountered while in motion or when in total repose. But they always look at us (there’s a glimmer in their eyes). What does the Klone figure see? It sees the street, the road, cars, passersby, people opening and closing shops, the passing day and of course it sees us as we look back and reciprocate, i.e., in relation to the Klone our gaze is always reciprocal, a gaze in response to that which has already turned to us, that which has come toward us. The encounter with Klone’s figures is one that always develops on the grounds of the primordial manner in which they face us, speak or call on us. But, where does this voice come from? What does it want? How should we listen and respond to such a call, whose language is unknown and yet whose affect is so undeniably clear?

Living in the city, we are familiar with a whole lexicon of appellations, modes of being addressed by others. Someone turns to us; he asks how to get to this street or the other, or whether we’ve seen the dog that was till recently tied to that fence. Another person asks us for money. Sometimes we respond to the other’s request and at other times we turn our back to it; but as long as the context and content of these situations is clear, we know how to position ourselves vis-à-vis the address of the other. “I need money for the bus, please give me a few shekels”: we know what that means and how to act accordingly. We can either give the other person the money they’re asking for or refuse, say something as an answer or ignore them, but whatever we do the context in which he or she has turned to us – the issue at stake – seems clear.

With Klone’s figures, however, the situation is completely different. The Klone figure turns to us but it remains unclear what it wants of us. The predator-alien-human speaks in a voice which we can’t hear, or rather a voice which cannot be heard, as long as we expect it to ask us for something specific – “something” that would be intelligible in our own language. The Klone’s voice has its own range of reverberation, one that is foreign to our ear’s habits and expectations. Is the Klone speaking in silence or is it speaking in tongues? This voice has nothing to do with the divine; it is completely finite and fully belongs to the ordinary – just like ourselves; but just like us, it too is at the same time a stranger to the ordinary. We can say hello, linger a bit, look from here or from there, but we shall never be able to bridge the distance between us, because this predator neither wants to devour nor to accept any charity from us. It faces us in a manner that neither hides nor reveals anything. It’s address is very simple – so simple, in fact, that it transcends the specificity of any particular request. But doesn’t this completely change the order of things? Is the predator’s address a request at all – or is it, perhaps, a kind of giving?

This text is segments from Introduction of the book, Act of State – A Photographed History of the Israeli Occupation. The book is based on a photographic exhibition on the history of the occupation that was mounted at the Minshar art gallery in Tel Aviv on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. Curator of the exhibition, Israeli philosopher Ariella Azoulay, put together work of some 80 photographers, shows 700 black-and-white and color pictures. provides visual testimony of the texture of Israel’s occupation of Palestine establishing a forty-year narrative of the painful aesthetics of destruction.

The exhibition Act of State proposed to observe the citizenry of photography in its daily routine, the occupation’s building blocks.[1] Every day, for forty years, these people are ruled by a power that does not recognize them as citizens and rules them as subjects. Like the exhibition, the book, too, is an attempt to propose a civil point of view over a period of forty years of occupation. This is a point of view that refuses to see the photographed persons only as occupied or as mere objects of photographs. This point of view offers the space of photography as a space in which those who have been forced into statelessness, deprived of citizenship, comprise – the citizenry of photography. Through photography they demand their right to political speech and action and invite the spectators to reinstate with them the political space of which they have been dispossessed. The traces of their action are imbued in the various frames, and the spectators are invited to reconstruct it even when it seems negligible, nearly invisible.

Eldad Rafaelie, 1995. Bethlehem. Closure, a routine matter on every Israeli Independence Day. Palestinians are forbidden to enter Israel. But the sky is not excluded by edict. For a brief moment, the beauty of the fireworks removes from one’s mind the double context of this date which for the Jews signifies independence, while for Palestinians – their disaster (Naqba).

Through photography they demand their right to political speech and action and invite the spectators to reinstate with them the political space of which they have been dispossessed

The photographs are rich historical documents that enfold several – at times contradicting – narratives, of all who took part in producing that which the photograph shows. At one and the same time they show the narrative of the occupier and that of the occupied. I shall illustrate this with a photograph by Avi Simchoni (Israel Sun Agency) of 1969.

The foreground shows an arrest of a Palestinian by two soldiers. Deeper into the frame, to the right of the arrested person, one might detect another soldier, vigorously waving a club in the air. The gaze that follows the direction in which the club is raised finds several dozen Palestinian youngsters being chased back into their village. The army does not chase them away in order to spare them the sight of an arrest – they have seen many such arrests and will be seeing many more. The army chases them away in order to prevent them from congregating, from turning into civilian spectators whose point of view might disturb the coherence and justification with which the army wishes to don its actions. Their removal from the scene/frame, from the event that could have been at the center of the frame, was a matter of course, a part of the persistent and ongoing attempt to prevent the creation of a political public space in which the Palestinians could assemble freely and begin to discuss whatever they saw or consider how to react to the goings-on.

Alex Levac,1991. Nablus. No rifle-cleaning flannel strips left, so one of the detainees is simply ordered to take off his shirt and use it as a substitute blindfold. The soldier leading the line smiles at the camera like a principal dancer on stage, setting pace for his troupe. Not only are the Palestinians blindfolded and disoriented, they have been instructed to hold hands and move in line so the soldier can easily control their movement as he leads them to court.

***

It is wrong to see the First Intifada as the birth of Palestinian resistance, but the Intifada was, no doubt, a turning point as regards the visibility of the Occupation.

Only when it broke out, did harsh everyday reality in the Occupied Territories – clearly apparent in the photographs brought here – begin to appear as sheer horror; the stupid smile spread over the soldier’s face as he holds his gun like a proud warrior defending his homeland, while behind him ten Palestinian men wither on the ground for no apparent reason and who knows for how long, begins to be seen as an event, something to be reported. In this sense, the First Intifada was a radical turning point in that it managed to dislodge the homogeneity which the occupier had imposed upon the Israeli field of vision, and crack it, creating a place and giving presence to the subjugated Palestinians’ point of view.

***

The book insists on reconstructing what the picture shows, and exposing it as a complex field of relations. This insistence is based on the assumption that under Occupation, the space of photography is not just evidence of the acts and goings-on of humans, but often the arena in which they act, especially when they are denied proper civil existence.[2] In many of the photographs, the photographed persons take an active part in the photographic act and see it, like the photographer facing them, as an alternative framework, even if shaky, for the institutional frameworks that abandon them, injure them, shirk responsibility and refuse to make amends for the damages they do. The naturalization of the photographed persons through the act of photography itself assumes the existence of a civil space in which photographers, photographed and spectators share the recognition that what they see is unbearable, superfluous, an Act of State that should be defied.

Nella Magen Cassouto, 1967. The Wailing Wall. The plaza is already marked by various types of separation fences. The people who come to pray at the site are crowded against the Wall. From the center of the plaza, cleared of the demolition rubble that was the Maghrabia Quarter, a sign in three languages (Hebrew, English and French) warns: “Photography forbidden on the Sabbath”. Perhaps out of consideration, the sign does not include the indigenous language of those who – until several days earlier – lived here. In the foreground, the rubble of the Maghrabia Quarter.

The civil space of relations enabled by the photograph is a space in which the plaint of the photographed person can be heard and overcome the limits and limitations imposed by a sovereign rule that has imposed itself upon millions of non-citizens. The Occupation is a national project towards which this ruling power mobilizes its citizens from very early on. Immensely potent ideological mechanisms wish to diminish citizenship and identify it with participation in this national project. In this situation, the use of photography – by the photographed, the photographers and the spectators – is a means of resuscitating common citizenship in both senses: citizenship as a basis for solidarity relations between the governed of various ethnicities vis-à-vis the regime and the evil it produces; citizenship as a buffer between citizens and the regime that demands their mobilization and support of its projects, contrary to the interests of all governed (both citizens and non-citizens).

In many of the photographs, the photographed persons take an active part in the photographic act and see it, like the photographer facing them, as an alternative framework, even if shaky, for the institutional frameworks that abandon them, injure them, shirk responsibility and refuse to make amends for the damages they do

The insistence on differentiation and nuance characterizing the shown photographs is part of an objection to the discourse that claims that “the viewers’ eyes have dulled with time”. An effort is made here to avoid the dominant norm: “If we’ve seen one picture of the Occupation – we’ve seen them all”. The singularity of what people undergo is not given, not even in photographs that make things visible as it were.

Ariela Shavid, 1968. Gaza. The soldiers and tourists look to the left, towards something going on outside the frame and hidden from its viewers. The only thing obvious to the viewer is the fact that the two Palestinian boys appearing in the frame turn their backs to that same occurrence and attempt to get away stealthily. They do not seem interested or are not allowed to watch it. Is a mass arrest taking place there, or perhaps a forbidden political gathering?

To enable its appearance, the photograph must be made to speak. Responsibility must be taken for the photographed persons who – present there in the center or margins of the frame – direct themselves at the viewers, demand in their gaze to reinstate that solidarity of the governed. We were aided by few testimonies of the persons photographed (the few that were available, especially regarding the recent two decades), direct information about specific photographs that prevents their being turned into an illustration of a generalized theme (place of publication, year, context), indirect information (reports of the phenomenon they represent, and period descriptions) about them, cross checking with other photographs taken at that same situation or another, delving into every detail in the photograph while reenacting the photographer’s location, cooperation and involvement of the photographed, and circumstances of the photograph (stealth or license, prey or loot) and through conversations with the photographers.

In spite of the similarity between certain photographs, any photograph selected enabled us to see something that appears only in it and nowhere else. These singular moments may belong to different planes of the photograph. At times, when those singular moments are present on the visible plane, they should be pointed at in order to be seen. Such, for example, is a photograph from 1967, where a crowd of Jewish Israelis are seen gazing up at the Wailing Wall. Directing the viewers’ attention to the pile of debris at the bottom part of the frame enables the presence-ing – in such a hegemonic photograph – of the Maghariba quarter that had just been demolished to make room for the Wailing Wall to appear the monument it is. At times, such a moment belongs to the space relations of the photographic event, and emerges only if we assume that the persons photographed actively participated in the act of photography and did not just let someone take their picture. Such an instance is the photograph of Zacharia Zbeide, the ‘wanted man’ who, at the moment his photograph is taken, knows that the security forces are out to hunt him down and chooses (in 2001) to face a photographer (Miki Kratsman) for a classical portrait in which he seems to be saying: “Here I am”. At other times, the singular moment does not even exist visually – it is present in the background of the photograph, in its unseen context, lending the situation a more tangible experience. A case in point is the knowledge that the woman photographed has been granted ten minutes to gather her belongings before the bulldozer begins to raze her home (Yosef Ohman documented the demolition of Imwas village, 1967 or Nir Kafri four decades later).

In exhibition venues, photographs are usually captioned laconically. The extreme case is the common “Untitled”. The accepted norm is a nondescript mention of the year and place. This marking convention expresses an age-old separation of image and text, particularly in the art world and the media, and in culture in general. The result of this form of display is that spectators very rarely receive any information about what they see. But this information is crucial to understanding what the photograph shows. It is important, for instance, to know what enabled the photographer’s presence at the scene: was he or she there as a soldier (Oded Yedaya conducting house searches during the First Intifada in1989; Simcha Shirman while making arrests, 1988) or as a press photographer (Uzi Keren, Jim Hollander, Israel Sun or Miki Kratsman). Is he authorized to be there (Ziv Koren present at the arrest of suspects, 2006, or Nir Kafri prior to demolishing houses, 2002) or sneaking into the scene (Rina Castelnuovo in front of the Dome of the Rock, 1998, or Eldad Rafaeli during curfew, 2002). Was he or she commissioned by the army (photographing the terrorist lying on the ground, shot, in Israeli army uniform, photographer anonymous, 2002), or present independently of the army (Ariela Shavid, Nella Magen Cassouto, Tzachi Ostrovsky, Joel Kantor or Alex Levac). Such knowledge expands the field of vision provided by the photograph, extricating it from its pictorial state and turning it into a live theater of human relations.

Yosef Ohman, 1967. Imwas. A weary reservist in full gear explains to the woman in the picture that within minutes she will have to leave her home. Does she know she will never return? Does she know that nothing of it will remain? Does he know what he is doing? Is the young soldier on the right covering his eyes with his fingers because he has trouble dealing with the horror of which he is a part, or is this, perhaps, an expression of his impatience with the woman who is trying to win time and appeal to the reservist’s feelings?

Similarly, it is no less important to know the particulars of the photographed persons’ involvement: were they willing subjects, or did they freeze at the sight of the camera because the photographer was, perhaps, in uniform, perhaps armed, perceived as ordering them “to be photographed”? (Oded Yedaya during house searches in  Gaza, 1989). Were the snowballs in the hands of the masked Palestinian boys (Nir Kafri, 2002) being thrown at their mates or at soldiers they encountered? Does the officer who prevents his men from continuing to kick the shackled Palestinian lying at their feet do so because of the photographer’s arrival at the scene? (Miki Kratsman, 1988) It is also important to know that the narrow bathroom, where a mother and her children are seated under the sink, is the only room that survived the demolition of their home (Micha Kirshner, 1988); that the child facing the camera who raises his hands in a proud V gesture was hit in his head by a live bullet (Anat Saragusti, 1983); that the officer walking away from a group of boys waving behind him has left in agreement (Jim Hollander, 1987); that the Palestinians bathing in the sea gathered there in masses minutes after the last Israeli army trucks and tanks left Gaza (Nir Kafri, 2005); that the lifeguard shack on the Gaza beach was once an Israeli army post (Guy Raz, 1999); and that the war machine in the picture both kills people and demolishes houses (Meir Wigoder, 2005); that the armored vehicle driving through the town is calling upon its residents to come out of their homes (Government Press Office, 1967); that the bus in which Palestinians’ IDs are being checked is actually in Tel Aviv (Tzachi Ostrovsky, 1968); that the scene watched by Palestinians is the Four Days March about to end in Jerusalem (Israel Sun, 1969); that the fireworks display mesmerizing the Palestinian crowd overhead is actually held in celebration of Israel’s Independence Day (Eldad Rafaelie, 1995). This information equips the spectators with the necessary minimum (never sufficient) to understand the situation so that they can revert to the photograph and read it anew.

Oded Yedaya, 1989. Gaza. House searches in the middle of the night. The additional child on the left, absorbed in the dark, stands behind the bed, his hands lowered and his gaze to the camera. When the photographer facing them broke into their home in uniform in the middle of the night, did they have any other way of understanding his armed presence except as an order to stand still, braced and ready for the next command?

***

When I started working on this exhibition, I realized there is no existing photographed history of the Occupation which I might use as a point of departure, argue with – and deviate from it. I never imagined how complicated it would be, producing such a body of information, and did not comprehend the implications of the fact that no public institution collects and preserves in any orderly fashion photographs of the Occupation which might be studied and reveal its history. Daily press archives contain numerous photographs, but the rights to use them are not owned by the newspapers themselves. The fact that a newspaper – one of the main gatherers of information about the present – is not a source to be cited for non-commercial purposes with the visual information it presents every day to an enormous reading public, begs the question: is historical research conceivable in which researchers are forbidden to cite stories of journalists because these are the owners of their articles? Does the press not bear an ongoing responsibility for the information – visual material included – that it presents its readers, a responsibility that obliges it to change the form of its contract with the photographers, even if resulting in higher costs, in order to be able to eventually cite their photographs at least non-commercially in the same manner as newspaper texts? The immediate meaning of the present state of affairs is that visual information distributed by the press is one-time material that may not be put to public use. Photographic property relations were institutionalized, warped, as an outcome of historical circumstance, as though photography were simply a work of art, and as a result, persons photographed as well as interested (non-commercial) viewers have, in fact, no right to fully participate in the public discussion of the photograph itself.

Still, the fact that Palestinian photographers’ presence in the exhibition is diminished, does not make it an Israeli exhibition. My working assumption regarding photography challenges essential distinctions between a Jewish-Israeli point of view and a Palestinian one

Under such circumstances, this book and the exhibition on which it is based were not possible to create without the generosity of dozens of photographers who opened their archives to me and gave me their works. Without the photographers’ archives, the only way to research and present the history of the Occupation from the perspective of photography would depend solely on photographs preserved by government agencies that open to the public at large only a part of their photographic material, such as the Government Press Office and the army spokesperson office. Those photographs are indeed important and some of them are included in the exhibition, but serious study cannot be based on these censored databases which ruling power collects and supplies. The veteran press-photography agencies active in Israel since the sixties are an important source as well, but these are private agencies and they usually charge money for even looking at their material, and considerably more so for presenting or reprinting their photographs.[3] Since the First Intifada, and especially the Second Intifada, massive public visual information has appeared through the presence of various organizations and associations active in the Occupied Territories, committed to resist the Occupation. Their activity includes a whole channel of photographic documentation and its preservation. Activists and researchers working for these organizations take photographs, collect and preserve them on a regular basis. Another change has taken place at the onset of the 21^st century, with the proliferation of digital cameras and electronic dissemination of news. But the much greater accessibility of photographs for study has not altered the issue of reserved rights over photographs that are retained by the photographers.

Miki Kratsman , 2001. Jenin. Until his portrait was taken, Zachariah Zbeide was wanted by the security services, but his face was unfamiliar. Courtesy of the photographer, and his own exposure to the camera, he passed over this game of hide-and-seek with the GSS – that had remained clandestine, turning him into a “wanted” security outlaw – into the public sphere in which he wishes to appear now through a direct portrait, identified and defiant, as a freedom fighter against the Occupation and the “targeted executions” apparatus it had created.

The extreme escalation in oppressive measures taken by the Occupation regime during the past decade, alongside the growing number of Palestinian photographers boycotting and refusing to collaborate with Israel – even those who until a few years ago still took part in projects openly resisting the Occupation in cooperation with Israelis – have kept them from participating in this project and it is therefore based especially on the work of Israeli photographers. Still, the fact that Palestinian photographers’ presence in the exhibition is diminished, does not make it an Israeli exhibition. My working assumption regarding photography challenges essential distinctions between a Jewish-Israeli point of view and a Palestinian one. Firstly, a photograph is a result of an encounter between the photographer, the camera and the persons photographed, and the power relations among them are not necessarily stable, nor contracted into a dichotomy that has been established within a certain theoretical discourse between the photographer as subject and the person photographed as object. Secondly, that which has been drawn in the frame is never merely a reflection or expression of an ideological point of view that may have been the photographer’s, certainly not his or her national identity, since the photographs of situations such as represented in Act of State always contain, as well, the point of view of the persons photographed. Therefore, even if the hegemonic Jewish-Israeli gaze – coming into being during the war and in the euphoric period immediately following – was mostly indifferent to the harsh sights created by the Occupation, these sights did penetrate hegemonic frames. Thirdly, one cannot reduce the meaning of the photographic image to a mere ‘denotation’/instruction of the photograph (“This is x” or “that is y”); this meaning is established in a domain of relations that is opened and organized anew every time a viewer look at the photograph.

Simcha Shirman, 1988. Deir Amar. The phrase “He must be blindfolded” instructs the soldiers in their arrests. No one wonders about this automatic act that denies the Palestinians their eyesight. Seating the detainee on a chair in a secluded building is already an independent initiative on the part of these particular soldiers who preferred not to have his presence (albeit sightless) disturb them while pursuing their arrest mission.

Most of the photographs in the Acts of State project, then, are by Jewish-Israeli photographers who – immediately following the 1967 war – documented the demolition of Imwas and Beit Nuba villages and their refugees (Yosef Ohman), the demolition of the Maghariba neighborhood (Nella Magen Cassouto), the demolition of houses in Hebron after the war (Ariela Shavid), the refugee camps (Rachel Hirsch, Anat Saragusti, Israel Sun, Osnat Krasnansky, Shuka Glotman, Miki Kratsman), protest and resistance (Jim Hollander, Joseph Algazy, Alex Levac), the poor conditions of employment of Palestinians in Israel (Uzi Keren, Israel Sun and Joel Kantor), incursions into Palestinian homes (Nir Kafri, Anat Zakai, Noa Ben Shalom, Rina Castelnuovo, Dafna Kaplan), arrests of Palestinians and searches held in their homes and on their bodies (Miki Kratsman, Eldad Rafaelie or Ziv Koren), detention centers (Nir Kafri and Roi Kuper), military devices and facilities used by the army (Meir Wigoder and Guy Raz), direct body injury (Micha Kirshner and Ruchama Marton), Occupation “landscapes” (Israel Sun, Assaf Evron, Nella Magen Cassouto and Simcha Shirman), mobile POW pens (Tzachi Ostrovsky). They did this because they, or the newspaper they were working for, saw the goings-on at least in certain points in time as a moral or political outrage that must be recorded, and should become a matter of public concern.

Many of the photographs I assembled for the exhibition reached me with only partial information, if at all, usually including the year they were taken, the place and nature of the occurrence. However, that nature usually referred to the event where a photo was taken, and very seldom directly to the substance of that specific shot of that event. Thus, for example, the description “demonstration” or “arrest” accompanying a large part of the photographs was in fact wholly secondary to the highly complex goings-on I discovered in a lengthy observation of the photographed persons. I tried to imagine the situations documented in the photographs, to assume various details cut away from the rectangular frame, or such that could not be contained in it but are materially relevant to that which is seen. Where will she place her barefoot baby in order to change its diaper, as their domicile -until just a few hours ago – has turned into rubble and dust? What will she do when her child is hungry? Or when she gets tired? When she will need to get away from the bustle, from its crying, to have a moment to herself? Where will she cook her baby’s soup? Calm it down? How many houses were razed in order to produce this plaza? Was the photograph of the wanted person familiar before he decided to have his picture taken? Where do they direct their gaze? What are the sights they see when they come home from school every day, what kind of decisions are they called upon to make at such an early age? Why are these arrested while those are removed from the scene? Some of the questions might be answered, others remain unanswered, but merely posing them enables us to glean more and more details from the photograph and respond to the people photographed, whose constant presence demands us to act upon our minimal civil duty and political imagination and not to leave them in the vastness of horror where anything seen in them is etched in that low resolution that says “I can’t look at this” or “We can do nothing”.[4]

Avi Simchoni, 1969. Gaza. The distance kept among boys walking down the street with their schoolbags is not characteristic of children walking home from school. Their own experience and the presence of a soldier – a club in his right hand – are ample reminder to avoid walking in groups if they do not want to be suspected of political gathering.

The fact that most of the persons photographed are not identified by their name and were not allowed to reach Tel Aviv, where the exhibition was held, and could not view the photographs on display, has cast its shadow over the project from its very inception. The publication of this book is an opportunity to share this archive with the people photographed in it, whose pictures have forcedly become part of a political album shared with their occupier.

Many people believe that art is special and exempt from conventional scrutiny. While art may be transcendent, the art world should be subject to the same standards as anywhere else. We think there’s a civil rights issue here. Rosalba Carriera, from an interview with the Guerrilla Girls

Guerrilla Girls, The Advantages Of Being A Woman Artist

Whose voice represents my voice?

Most teachers in Israel are women. Who represents them, their voice? A White male. The majority of Doctors who specialize in women’s bodies – gynecologists – are male. Most heads of women’s health departments in hospitals– are male. Most Film Directors who tell stories about our world are male. The Oscar for Best director has never been awarded to a woman. Is this an issue? Or should we wait for the day all doctors specializing in male genitalia are women?

THE ANATOMICALLY CORRECT OSCAR, A billboard at Highland and Melrose in Hollywood, March 1-31, 2002 Presented by the Guerrilla Girls and Alice Locas, a group of film makers. " Did you know that no woman has ever won the Oscar for Best Director, and that only two have ever been nominated? That 94% of the writing awards have gone to men? Or that only 3% of all the acting awards (lead and supporting) have ever gone to people of color."

Recently I participated at a national conference for women’s mental health. I salute this conference and its creator. The conference held a photography exhibition – also a blessed idea – and called out to women artists to send in work. All the artists were women. The subject was – women’s lives in Israel. The chosen curator was – a famous, talented, smart, academic – man. On the catalogue jacket- was a photograph by a famous, talented (dead) male photographer. Is this an issue?

The conference organizers and the curator himself – betrayed ignorance. Ignorance of the her-story of art. Women artists have been excluded from the pages of history of art; “her- story” is being added to “his-story” only since the mid-eighties. The same is true of women philosophers, scientists, etc. Being ignored/invisible is painful, devaluating, and can and does create mental chaos. I remind you – the subject of the conference was promoting women’s mental health. The conference, in practice, re-created – or mirrored the situation in the world. While more opportunities are available for women artists, the money and prestige usually goes elsewhere. In Israel for instance, most art students are women, most curators and critics are women but the powerful positions of directors, head of art departments and academies, collectors, are predominantly male.

Lee miller, Nude bent forward, 1931

The places of value and honor – the curator job and the cover of the catalog – should have been afforded to women specialists. A women curator, who is knowledgeable about “her story” of art, a famous woman photographer like Lee Miller, who has been rewritten into the pages of art his/herstory just recently.

What I’m trying to say is that there is a danger of being presumptuous and condescending when trying to represent someone else, even when you mean well. There are artists who have become famous for works in which they exploit other people in order to prove the point of people being exploited. In his work 8 Foot Line Tattooed on Six Remunerated People (1999) Mexican Artist Santiago Sierra hired six unemployed young men from old Havana and paid them $30 if they agreed on having a horizontal line tattooed on their back. In 160 CM Line Tattooed on 4 People (2000), four drug-addicted Spanish prostitutes allowed their backs to be tattooed, and were paid with heroin in exchange. A few months later, in his work 10 People Paid To Masturbate (2000) the artist paid 10 Cuban men $20 each to masturbate on video, thus alluding to the fact that people in the third world are ready to sacrifice their health for a minimal amount of money. Sierra claims to bring attention to capitalism, exploitation, power relations, and he does; his work ignites heated discussion regarding these issues. However, whose voice is Sierra representing? The heroin addicts? The prostitutes? The homeless? The poor workers of the third world? They remain painfully mute and nameless. In the name of art, he reproduces the exact system he wants to criticize. These volunteers are scarred for life by the capitalist system, and now by Sierra’s tattoo as well. My question – can there be another way to prove the same point? Must Sierra, myself and others create a similar artistic system which degrades these people the way social structures degrade them? In order to prove cruelty must one be cruel?

Santiago sierra, 160 CM Line Tattooed on 4 People

“Whose voice is it” is a dominant subject which backlights my work both as filmmaker, photographer and Speaker. I focus on the relative invisibility of women’s voices because I am a woman, and the biggest shift in my life and work occurred when I encompassed women’s perspectives and experiences in books films and art. It changed the way I saw myself, it changed my perspective of the world. It changed my life.

Witnessing the dynamics of unheard/distorted voices of women in the world made me sensitive to other places where similar dynamics occur to other peoples. Being conscious of the power of an image to influence reality, Sierra and I are interested in the artist’s role in society, and believe artists have a responsibility. I’m not sure we agree about the “how”.

In my own work I try to start from myself – my personal life. I feel I have a right to talk about and represent myself, that taking a photograph of someone else – especially someone who didn’t give her consent, or is not a personal acquaintance, is like “stealing” a part of their soul for my own selfish purposes. Photographers Nan Goldin and Elinor Carucci, writers Naomi Wolf and Erica Jong, independent filmmakers Allan Berliner, Dan Katsir, Jennifer Fox, Independent researcher Judith Rich Harris all start from their own lives. They honestly and bravely put their own voices in the center, not as egomaniacs, but in a conscious act of saying- reality can be seen many ways, and this is my way. I am not hiding behind objectivity of one sort or another. We all have agenda’s, instead of pretending there is an objective agenda, I put my agenda on the line.

I will give two examples: a photography project in which I consciously and intentionally use my own experience to echo a whitewashed reality, and a documentary film, in which the question whose voice is it reverberates throughout the whole process.

***

I would never photograph a person without permission. It’s voyeuristic. When you trap someone in your camera you have to be invited. Prof. W.J.T (Tom) Mitchell in a interview with Dana Gillerman in Haaretz The Lie of the Land, April 2008

Subjective voice as conscious act of rebellion

In my photography project The Mother, Daughter and Holy Spirit I photographed parts of my redeformed post pregnancy skin in order to address a nonpersonal and practically denied subject of how families and mothers in particular are mistreated and unacknowledged in western society.

I believe the myth about the ease and naturalness of mothering – the ideal of the effortlessly ever- giving mother – is propped up, polished, and promoted as a way to keep women from thinking clearly and negotiating forcefully about what they need from their partners and from society at large in order to mother well without having to sacrifice themselves in the process . Naomi Wolf, Misconceptions.

The subjective perspective in the work – represented in large scale topographic aerial- like photographs (120X18ocm) and texts – is purposeful and subversive as mother’s points of view are (still), in proportion to the extent of the phenomena, few, and traditionally hijacked in the name of advertising, nationality, and psychology. “The mother’s subjective existence is still missing”, says Anat Palgi-Hecker in her book The Mother in psychoanalysis,  although the mother has become increasingly important in developmental psychoanalytic theory and in understanding object relations in the last decades, she claims, the mother’s own subjective existence has been left in the dark. This is the reason I shed light on my subjective existence as a mother:

I pointed my camera to the “nature reserve” that emerged in the center of my body because the skin that was created, or more accurately, was left on the stomach area after giving birth, resembled, or looked like – exposed intestines. The stomach visually opened – gaped, and became a mouth – expressing what I felt and couldn’t say, and what no one else wanted to hear.

In the process of pregnancy labor and parenting there were many things I couldn’t refuse…you are invaded (sprouts), by somebody else’s cells, by other’s hands, by tests opinions and practices, your form is changed, your stomach is spread, jumped on, (Waterbed), pressed, depressed, caressed (push), your desires and feelings are ignored.. Your mouth is shut– (bad aid), your form is ripped open (void), you are sucked from- (mobile), cut, and all in good spirits; Balloons, colorful ribbons and congratulations. (Gift)

The ‘acceptable’ thing to do is to hide not only the real feelings and thoughts, but also the tummy in its current shape…So I consciously took back control. I chose to refuse the dominant fashion/trend of whitewashing (Mt. Novolak)…

The body, or skin, didn’t conceal. She didn’t conceal the tension and extreme stretching, the pain and suffering of this stretch, the contraction and depletion, the old age. She didn’t hide the rip and tear, the cracks, rifts and swallow holes. The stomach became, in the most visual and unromantic aspect, mother earth. [1. From Interview with Dr. Hadara Sheflan Katsav]

The exhibition provokes heated discussion regarding the many untold truths (scars) of pregnancy birth and parenting and encourages others to expose their own (scars) horror stories. It is subversive because it contradicts the “usually blissful” images associated with pregnancy and birth, and humorously exposes an ugly physical lie, which, like a magician’s scarf from a hat, is linked to many other hazardous lies. It’s not the (60 percent) women and their faulty hormones who need to be altered by psychiatric drugs; it’s the system that needs changing.

I presented the project in a lecture titled Mother Earth and all that Crap, at the 3rd national conference for promoting women’s mental health at Ben Gurion University, in a session dealing with Post Partum Depression, and AM currently electronically presenting it at the international conference M(o)ther Trouble on contemporary debates, analyses and representations of the maternal at Birkbeck, University of London United Kingdom.

***

Whose voices are documentaries and mainstream media representing?

Two States of Mind is my Award winning Documentary film nicknamed by the press “Thelma and Louise of the Middle East”. The film chases the relationship of two vivacious dynamic women, Naomi from Tel Aviv and Ihsan from Ramalla, while they navigate their “peace team” vehicle across the Sahara Desert of Morocco in a tough jeep rally. Two extreme political realities: Near peace, and ruthless war ride along.

Naomi and Ihsan from Two states of Mind

I decided to give women’s and moderate’s voices and actions the attention of my camera because these voices regarding the Israeli Palestinian conflict are mostly invisible to the general public. In fact, United Nations, for the same reason created resolution 1325 calling for inclusion of women in all negotiation teams. War affects women differently then men and more women and children are being killed in recent wars. Regarding moderates: According to Dr.Khalil Shikaki nearly 70 percent of both Israeli’s and Palestinians support an end to the conflict and two-thirds (the majority) of both publics are opposed to violence. Wow. This same majority, however, is positive the “other” side doesn’t want to end the wars. “No partner for peace”, in other words. Hmmm. How is it possible both societies have such a tragically wrong perception? In my opinion mainstream media (which I name “the BIG camera”) is the main culprit.

In Photography and Politics conference in Bezalel academy of art (2007) Artist photographer and teacher Roi Kuper said “it’s a fact people want to see blood and violence” and he quoted Susan Sontag. I grimaced at this, and so did the woman photographer and educator sitting next to me. Maybe some people like to see juicy gory stuff and this is what the media is feeding them, but where are the opinions of men and women like us? Those who can’t stand violence, even comic-book violence, who don’t read the papers because of it, who, when pregnant, feel this aversion to violence ten-fold?

The opportunity to voice my opinion arrived: the political message the rally, Naomi, Ihsan and myself were interested in spreading was that co–existence exists and even if hard, possible. Their relationship was proof. The production company of the film (my boss) had other plans.

“If the film is to succeed, we need a conflict. No one will be interested in two friends getting along. They’re not really friends anyhow. Make them fight, give us blood, it’s good for drama and ratings”. I was witnessing first -hand how, for the sake of ratings, media creates conflict. Accepting this philosophy, which is taught at every film school (nothing moves forward in a story accept through conflict –Story by Robert McKee), would be making art in a similar way to Santiago Sierra; In order to prove the tragedy of the conflict I would be recreating and perpetuating the presumed reality of an Israeli Palestinian conflict. By making them fight I would be convincing the audience there is no such thing as Israeli – Palestinian cooperation. I also would be betraying and manipulating Naomi’s Ihsan’s and my voices for someone else’s interests. The public wants blood. And the production company wants to sell this expensive film to the public. For the sake of a film. Of Art. Of ratings

Whose’ voice/point of view is this? And how will I ever get work if I disagree?

In the end I did what the production company wanted, but I made it visual and obvious. Instead of editing out my bothersome questions and Naomi and Ihsan’s disdainful reactions, I left them IN. “Why did you pester them with those questions?” is my favorite question in a Q/A session after a screening: the audience dislikes the question asker and sides with the women’s friendship. They are against the production company, which my questions represent. The manipulation tactics are exposed, and we discuss media and its power in our world. Yes, I manipulated Naomi and Ihsan, but they express their opinion about it. They are not silent. At least not totally mute, like the men with the tattoo on their back in Sierra’s work. “Sometimes the Camera can be dangerous” says Ihsan, while covering the camera lens with her hand.

I lecture with Two States of Mind on the role of media in conflict and Women’s and moderates voices. When speaking, I especially stress informing audiences of the invisible but lethal manipulation inherent in the documentary medium because of its allure of “a true story”. Few ask whose voice is this. And moderates voices are rarely front page meat. This creates a false perception of reality. Making decisions to go to war based on a false picture of reality is tragic. As Rosalba Carriera said- “there’s a civil rights issue here”.

]]> http://www.maarav.org.il/english/2009/07/any-woman-in-the-directors-room/feed/ 20 http://www.maarav.org.il/english/2009/06/in-the-middle-of-what-exactly/ http://www.maarav.org.il/english/2009/06/in-the-middle-of-what-exactly/#comments Wed, 10 Jun 2009 19:44:30 +0000 Nat Muller http://www.maarav.org.il/english/?p=37

Wafa Hourani, "Qalandia 2047"

Exhibition titles are always interesting indicators to assess a show.  Ideally they express or capture the curatorial gesture, and give a hint of the show’s flavour. Titles are in that respect bearers of expectation: soft signifiers of what there is to come. What then to make of as opaque a title as “In the Middle of the Middle”? And how to position the show within its temporal and geo-political coordinates:

1. a show of artists from the Middle East region
2. in a commercial German-Lebanese white cube gallery
3. located in Beirut’s Karantina area, the site of multiple massacres during Lebanon’s 15-year long civil war (1975-1990)
4. seizing the moment when all things Mid-East or Arab are en vogue within the international art world

Obviously pinpointing any kind of “middle” is a locative act. It presupposes that there is a delineation of a terrain, either material or not, where a centre can be located.  By corollary, emphasising the middle of something that is unspecified, i.e. an abstract middle, any positioning or position statement becomes nullified and specificity is eradicated. Indeed, does this “middle” relate to the centre, as in the Middle East being a centre of sorts and not – at least culturally speaking – a periphery.  Or is it the “middle” of a political conflict and war zone? Perhaps – conform to hype and trend – this middle is in the middle of refreshing a blasé and saturated global art market?  Less generously, the” middle” might in some way or other allude to compromise, mediocrity, and the failure to really make a choice and therefore opt for a “middle way”. Or shall I just play devil’s advocate and wonder whether this all calls for a rather self-conscious self-referential reading, namely that these artists and this show are simply in the midst of what is currently important art-wise, by the mere grace of its title (”In the Middle of the Middle”), its curator (Catherine David) and its gallery (Sfeir-Semler, Beirut).

exhibition view, Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut

Though, it is characteristic of white cube spaces to ignore their contextual surroundings, the reek of the adjacent slaughterhouse and the garbage dump in Karantina, make it difficult to fully evacuate the notion of place.  The same goes for the complicated ride to actually get to the gallery.  Tucked away within what is now a rundown industrial area, it really is for many Beiruti cab drivers off the map: in the middle of nowhere, rather than in the middle of somewhere or something.  Without even having discussed a single work, somehow all of the above beautifully brings together the cocktail of discourses related to issues of representation, location, context, and last but not least commerce, this exhibition – as many others riding on the same wave of “regional Mid-East exhibitions” – struggle with.

Announced as the first show in the Middle East of renowned French curator Catherine David – whose previous projects include a.o. Contemporary Arab Representations (1998-) and Documenta X – Sfeir-Semler Gallery proudly introduced the project the following way:

Catherine David has invited for this exhibition 12 artists coming from multi-national and cultural backgrounds in the Middle East. The artists use different media, ranging from painting, photography and video to installation, to portray and confront in many different ways the realities of their environment. They are also referring to heterogeneous formal paradigms according to the different cultural and formal genealogies they went through.

Arguably it is fashionable amongst curators to claim to “let the work speak for itself”; Documenta 12 was an apt and failed example of that approach. Its effect is that more often than not it amplifies curatorial authority, without necessarily justifying it. Whether intentional or not, how can one within that context insist on the importance of location and specificity, and how these tie into certain artistic practices, whilst at the same time completely erasing the latter by means of turning it into a mere trope? If we abide by the preposition that cultural specificity is not a trope, but a very material reality, which conditions production and perception, then the rationale and the make-up of David’s exhibition becomes very confusing.

Moreover, the eclectic vagueness in choice and presentation of works remind more of the display at an art fair – which like Art Dubai and Art Paris-Abu Dhabi have recently hit the shores of the Gulf – than a curated exhibition. Many of the artists included in the show are indeed excellent, but why they were selected together, and why with these particular works, remains a question.  The main purpose then becomes the superficial act of showing an object presence. Not unlike art fairs there’s an exaggerated gesture of display at work here, which focuses on the presentation of art first and foremost as a product, albeit with an intellectual, aesthetic and – let us not forget – commercial value.

***

Nevertheless, what does not work on an exhibition-level, might work aptly on an individual project-level. The disconnect between mediation, context and display which plagues the whole show, is at the core of Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s excellent new video installation “L´Enlèvement” (2008). This piece is part of Zaatari’s ongoing Madani project, wherein he takes the archive of the Saida-based photographer Hashem El Madani’ and his studio Shehrazade (opened in the 1950s) as study material to understand the complex relationship which ties a studio photographer to his working space, his equipment and tools, economy and aesthetics, and further explore his ties to his clients, society and the city in general. The Madani Project takes shape as a series of thematic exhibitions, publications, interventions and videos centered on Hashem El Madani and his archive.  The installation shows us a video beamer placed conspicuously on a white plinth projecting a looped image of an super 8 film projector sitting beside the super 8 film jacket of the British TV action thriller series “The Protectors” (1972-1974). In the background there’s an indiscernable soundtrack – most likely of the series episode.

Akram Zaatari , "L´Enlèvement", 2008 video

As many Lebanese artists, Zaatari’s practice is one that excavates narratives and histories of the Lebanese socio-political condition. So Madani’s studio becomes like an archaeological site where meaning is retrieved not only from the photographic archives, but from all the objects found in the studio.  By exhibiting the super8 projector, found in Madani’s studio, along with one of the 3 super 8 films, also found in the studio, Zaatari isolates them and invests them with an object property with historical value, devoid of context. By doing this they attain a certain monumentality or hermeticism The suggested image and tools of image production become iconographic. In addition, the projector and the film become witness to the mechanisms of technology and mediation.  Zaatari does not show us the real machine and film, but a mediation of it through new technology: that’s why the beamer is so prominent.  In that sense the piece is very much about the system of image production. The only image we as spectators see is the representation of the image’s machination, and a dissection – which is almost simultaneously a re-assembling – of the product as a whole: audio, moving image, still image, the projectors and the film.

It is telling Zaatari has chosen an episode called “L´Enlèvement” (The Kidnapping) in a time when our sensory perception is being kidnapped by visual overload. Yet what this choice most importantly does, is emphasise once again that in his installation the image proper has been literally kidnapped by means of providing us an image of image production, instead of the image proper or the imaginary.

Walid Sadek, "Death and the Sun (What my father sees, most probably.)", 2008

Walid Sadek plays a similar game of expectation, representation and presence in his piece “”Death and the Sun (What my father sees, most probably.)”(2008). We are greeted by a pristine white space, which at a first glance seems empty. Upon closer inspection one can identify – in the middle of the central wall – 2 small knobs.  Ironically, the exhibition title takes a very literal turn here: the knobs are in “the middle of the middle” of the installation. Moreover, it is this locatable centrality that defines the installation as an installation, and not an empty space. The two knobs could be anything from bathroom fittings, to car parts.  It turns out – after consultation with a befriended curator – that the knobs are trumpet mouth pieces. An assistant professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Sadek is also a trumpet player, and former member of the legendary Beiruti underground band Soapkills. So how do we read this piece?  As a silenced trumpet tone, monumentalized in the institutionalized space of the white cube, which commands our respect solely because it exercises (an incomprehensible and illogical) presence. Or as a humourous nod to the art world where things are literally blown out of proportion? Indeed, it is the scale of things that make this piece so poignant, and the bewilderment that ensues.

Wafa Hourani, "Qalandia 2047", 2008, an installation in 5 parts

Very different is the work of Palestinian artist Waha Hourani. In “Qalandia 2047″, previously shown by Catherine David at the Thessaloniki Biennial (2007), Hourani offers us a detailed scale model of how he envisions the Qalandia refugee camp, a century from 1947 when the inhabitants were evicted from their homes, following the creation of the State of Israel. Situated on the road from Jerusalem to Ramallah, Qalandia camp and the Qalandia checkpoint encapsulate literally where Palestine has been divided and cut from its roots, territorially and historically.  Scarring the area around Qalandia is the separation wall, which Hourani in his maquette has dressed with mirrors on the Palestinian side. This partly suggests frivolity, but also implies that when the rest of the world is sealed off, one is forced to indulge in narcissism and gaze at oneself. On the other side of the wall, a menacing airstrip with fighter jets reminds us that 100 years onwards, little has changed. Hourani’s Qalandia is strewn with minute and playful details, such as sports cars, TV antennas sculpted into decorative forms and figures, colourful rooftops, flowerpots, photographs, graffiti, and even a real goldfish swimming in a fishbowl. Yet it remains a ghost town, a dollhouse of the occupation, beautified by ornament and mirrors, seeped in inertia. The artist has mapped out a vision as architect, archaeologist, chronicler of a past, and future forecaster. Nevertheless, similar to the goldfish, he remains trapped in a space too confined, in a history and a present too dictating. And of course – a representational format that can never convey that what he intends to do, namely the re-creation of an imaginary place, that is in effect a real place. This is perhaps the flaw of Hourani’s project: aesthetically and politically: he is still too much attached to the “real”.

Yasser Alwan, "Mounira - Cairo", 1999-2001

Hourani, Zaatari and Sadek’s works are probably the most conceptual and evocative works in the show. But what – for example – was the purpose of including the straightforward black and white documentary and portrait photography of Yasser Alwan?  Alwan’s prints of people in the Cairene streets seemed completely out of place next to Lebanese painter Ayman Baalbaki’s triptych “Ya Abati”, which show a series of masked, hooded, and helmeted male heads in a gilded frame. Baalbaki has been concerned with painting these male figures since 2001. Both Alwan and Baalbaki retain the sensibility of the fetish: Alwan’s almost (self-)orientalising urban ethnographies probably unintentionally, and Baalbaki’s anonymous heroes, martyrs, agitators and perpetrators quite intentionally. While Alwan’s work merely registers, and sanitises his photographic subjects without any real rapport to them, Baalbaki draws on Greek iconography and translates it to modern-time icons: the keffiyeh-clad freedom fighter, the pilot with gasmask, the hooded terrorist. Similarly to Alwan, 23-year old Syrian painter Simon Kabboush offers an urban photorealism in his canvases of Damascene streets; this is again an eye that registers rather than engages. Alwan as well as Kabboush have a tendency to undo their subjects of the specific, though locality supposedly features prime in their work. Yet the reading of the painting and the photos becomes serial and generic. Perhaps the reason that these three artists were grouped together is that their work is commercially quite viable (read sellable). Let us not forget that we are seeing this exhibition in a commercial gallery.

Anna Boghiguian, Untitled - Cavafy, 2007, pencil, ink + gouach on paper

In come the 2 painting series of Anna Boghiguian, which were presented separate from each other. Visual artist Hassan Khan has written the following about this Cairo-born Armenian artist: “it is sometimes unclear whether the work is a documentation of the personal, or a comment on the public”.[i] Bordering on the expressionistic, and literally scatological, her series “City of no exit” (2002) depicts crudely “The City of the Dead”, i.e. the cemeteries under the Muqattam Hills, which 5 million of Cairo’s poor have turned into their home. Plagued by a chronic housing shortage and poverty “The City of the Dead” is an oxymoron: a living urban organism housed between tombs and corpses.  In Boghiguian’s iterations, a lone naked female figure crouches amongst the tombs and defecates. Those who have met Anna Boghiguian might wonder whether the painter herself features in her own work, as a witness insisting on the base-level of humanity. There is a strong element of participatory, yet painful observation in her work; something you would rather turn your eye away from, than towards. The other series of paintings exhibited, are simply titled “Cavafy”, and take the Alexandrine Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933) as their cue. Boghiguian has worked extensively on the work of this poet since 1980, and overlays text with image and image with text, yet it remains very difficult – if not impossible – to grasp what we are exactly looking at, without the tiniest hint of explanation on the part of the gallery/curator. The Cavafy series (cross-)reference, interpret and visualize Cavafy’s poetry, but without any further information we are left with a very sparse interpretational framework; hardly enough to decode Boghiguian complex poetics.

Hani Rashed

Like Kabbous, Alwan, and Boghiguian, also Egyptian artist’s Hany Rashed’s work is presented in series. Granted, Rashed’s work and his signature style are all about seriality, and the reproducibility of a certain imagery, more often than not a generic human type. Yet, showing 3 of Rashed’s unrelated series next to each other, actually undo the impact one strong series would have had. Meticulous replication, so defining for Rashed’s work, runs the risk to turn into a mere accumulation of stuff. Showing only the Untitled collages (2007-08), consisting out of 35 collages, stuck to cardboard, 45 x 45 cm in size, would have been preferable and a firmer statement. The latter series resemble a mosaic, including popular Egyptian iconography and references. The feel is trashy, colourful and humourous, as if the artist were showing us a kaleidoscopic glimpse of Cairene human characters. Consumption, religious or materialist, feature heavily though playfully, as thematic. In that respect the 2003 series of facial mono-prints, and 2007 black and white untitled series, seem superfluous.  Here again, one wonders about which role this insistence on quantity and the almost aggressive display of oeuvre yields.

Equally superfluous was the screening room, showing video work by Wael Nouredinne, Joude Gorani and Rami Farah.  All these 3 works were programmed one after the other, and considering their length it was next to impossible to watch them all. Unfortunately, since the work of these three artists is strong.  This cannot be said of the videos of the Palestinian artist Jawad Al Malhi.  Presented in an installation-like fashion in a black cube with different size projections on the wall, 3 looped videos – all produced in 2008 – showed us respectively a man painting a house wall, a barbecue smoking, and an urban shot of dusk falling over what seems to be Jerusalem. Neither aesthetically, nor conceptually, did this work manage to engage. Moreover, it only emphasized the indecisiveness and clutter of how “In the Middle of the Middle” came across. And how ultimately this forceful move of placing the curatorial and institutional voice in the middle, without accountability and contextualisation, yields a middle that is void, rather than a rich.