Jumana Manna, Ahmad, 2007, Digital photo print, 72 x 59 cm, Foto: courtesy Jumana Manna, © Jumana Manna.

Essl Museum
An der Donau-Au 1
Vienna
+43-2243-370 50
Overlapping voices
Israeli and Palestinian Artists
May 16-October 26, 2008

Overlapping voices – Israeli and Palestinian Artists addresses an issue rarely presented. The display aligns itself with the museum’s established tradition of showcasing one region per year beyond the ambit of general artistic awareness. Following exhibitions such as Blood & Honey – Futures in the Balkans (curated by Harald Szeemann) or Mexican Modernism, this year’s presentation features a compelling selection of works by Israeli and Palestinian artists.

This is a rare possibility to discuss different artistic practices from a conflicted area. Many in Europe look at the situation in the Middle East in a simplistic and dichotomous way. Filtered by news coverage, much of the complexity disappears. Both Israeli and Palestinian societies contain a range of people, cultures and positions with rich and intertwined histories. However, these varied voices mostly disappear under immediate and easy-to-digest representations. This exhibition brings a few of these overlapping voices, which sometimes contradict more common and simpler positions.

Many art works in the exhibition are based on civic social structures, as many of the artists in this show are themselves social and cultural activists. Despite showing complexity and variety, the exhibition does not presume to encompass all visions or show a full spectrum of positions. Rather, this show tries to shed light on some interesting corners of cultural, social practices, and debate in the Israeli and Palestinian art scenes. Hopefully, this little light will challenge visitors to see a more complex reality and seek broader understanding of these places and conflict in the Middle East in general.

Osama Zatar shows surreal sculptures offering politically ironic-dadaistic commentary made of found objects and scrap from his village near Ramallah.

Yoav Weiss also uses irony: Following the example of the Berlin Wall, Yoav has built a website to sell parts of the separation wall erected by Israel to separate itself from Palestinian territories.

Eyal Ben-Dov shows visual ethnographic research conducted over five years with photo portraits from tribal new-age festivals across Israel.

Raed Bawayah uses portraiture photography as well as a visual research. Raed exposes a new photographic series of men working in the Palestinian police forces.

Manar Zuabi will install thousands of hair pins in the walls of the exhibition hall, arranged as an illusory map which might resemble shapes of human bodies, taken from memories of her family album and histories of human brutality.

Masha Zusman will exhibit Home, made of large wood panels with delicate and intricate colourful drawings. Repatriated from Soviet Union to Israel at the age of 18, the issues of home and homelessness, uprootedness and temporality are central to her work.

Asad Azi, in his studio in Jaffa where he works and lives away from his family in the village where he grew up, paints and immortalizes figures from old family photographs such as the new series painted on paper: Mother and Soldier.

Anisa Ashkar, body and performance artist, uses her face and body as her canvas, writing a new word in Arabic every day on her face. For the past six years she has lived her daily life with these calligraphies on her face. During the opening event she will perform in the main exhibition space, a theatrical performance based on the Greek myth of Medusa.

Ronen Eidelman, journalist, editor, artist and activist will show documentation of a recent action where he redrew on the grass of Charles Clore Park the streets of the Manshia neighbourhood which was built in the 19th century as a suburb of the Palestinian city Jaffa, and in the mid sixties was transformed into a beach-side park in Tel Aviv.

Shalom Amira presents his new video Terrarium, a collage of fragments of Israeli odd and obscure experiences: a sole demonstrator in front of Jerusalem City Hall, people attending strange religious ceremonies at saints’ tombs, National Independence celebrations for the family on top of a tank, and more.

Zoya Cherkassky and Avdy Ter-Oganian try to cope with the problematic of representing political issues with aesthetic tools. They created two abstract sculptures as maps of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to prove the failure of visual art to compete with rhetoric political practices.

Four of the projects created for the exhibition are a result of artistic collaboration between some of the artists and civil society organizations, Israeli and Palestinian, who present interesting visions for the understanding of the region and its challenges.

Shula Keshet works together with the Jewish-Arabic women’s organization Achoti (my sister), aiming to give a voice to marginalized African, Arabic-Jewish and Arabic-Palestinian women in Israel. Parrhesia, a group of Palestinian and Jewish artists from Israel and the Israeli organization Zochrot (Remembering the Palestinian Nakba) will continue with a project they did in Israel Through Language — a visual dictionary using graffiti of Hebrew and Arabic words in public spaces. In Vienna they will work with the artist Ursula Hofbauer and add German to their visual dictionary. Through Language raises issues regarding languages as a way to know the other and create a dialogue. Jumana Manna presents her new video Songs of Ascents showing a group of Palestinians singing — in Arabic — a Jewish Psalm about the return from exile. Finally, Tal Adler has worked together with the community of Bedouin villages in the Israeli desert, bringing their stories from the unrecognized villages to the open. He is planning to invite Bedouin community representatives to the Essl Museum for a meeting, lecture and a discussion panel in autumn.

Viennese Friedemann Derschmidt and Karin Schneider (Rites-institute, Vienna) curated the exhibition. They gained the support of Israeli artist and photographer Tal Adler and Palestinian singer Amal Murkus to curate on site.

The curators are aware, that many of the artistic positions involved, cannot be presented and understood properly in Europe without context. By being transferred into another — an Austrian — context, political messages could be distorted or misunderstood. To prevent this an information lounge with maps, glossaries and books give vistors an opportunity to better understand the complexity of this region and its connections with Austrian history — in particular the annihilation and ensuing diaspora of Europe’s Jews during the Nazi regime.

Zoya Cherkassky, Avdey Ter-Organian, Untitled, 2008, 40 cm (high), 20 x 20 cm (basis), Painted aluminum cast, Foto: archive from the artist, © Zoya Cherkassky.