While it is less than a 10-minute walk from the Tower of David Museum Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate to HaMiffal’s Hama’aravim Street participatory cultural center, in their joint inaugural exhibition they appear worlds apart.
In the exhibition space of the newly opened Angelina Drahi Entrance Pavilion, the Tower of David highlights Jerusalem’s earliest Jewish artists’ search for their new identity in the days of “the dream come true.” Simultaneously, the edgy cooperative art center, housed in a 19th-century mansion, emphasizes Jerusalem’s modern artists’ search for a new meaning to that identity through Jerusalem’s trials, failures, and successes in the city’s fraught modern reality.
Split between these two locales, “The Jerusalem School” is the first retrospective of art in Jerusalem as it developed through 100 years of creative work. Divided into “Spirit of the Stone” at the Tower of David and “Forsaken Zone” at HaMiffal, the exhibition examines the role of art specific to Jerusalem – from the early years of cultural renewal to the later years of fomenting struggle and the earnest search for a new Jerusalemite identity to encompass all its residents. “Forsaken Zone” is presented with the support of the Jerusalem Foundation.
“The Jerusalem School” duo exhibition opened at the end of March and runs through the end of the summer – with English tours starting at the Angelina Drahi Entrance Pavilion on Sundays at 1 p.m.
Exploring Israeli art and creativity at the Tower of David
DELVING INTO the world of Israeli art and collaborating with creative groups in Jerusalem is an important new endeavor for the renovated Tower of David Museum Jerusalem, said Eilat Lieber, director and chief curator of the museum.
“Our goal is also to discover the modern history of the city, and art is one of the most amazing perspectives to discover about Jerusalem,” she said.
“Usually, one doesn’t envisage Jerusalem as a center for art, but the beginning was here. The exhibition illustrates the complex reality and the underlying and repeat challenges; the tension between the different segments of the population; the continual struggle between the center and the periphery regarding the definition of communal Israeli values; and the internal and external pressures in articulating the complicated communal structure between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians and the State of Israel.”
Lieber noted that “Spirit of Stone” is a tribute to the very first exhibitions of Eretz Israel [Land of Israel] art in the Land of Israel, which were held at the Tower of David from 1921 until the 1930s, during the British Mandate.
Curated by Tal Kobo, “Spirit of Stone” delves into the initial 50 years of Eretz Israel art in Jerusalem, spanning from the First Aliyah to the establishment of the state.
Through art, literature, and the lives of artists of the era, it explores the intimate connection between physical Jerusalem and its cultural representation, reimagining biblical Jerusalem as the heart of the “Chosen People” and constructing a new Jerusalem within the context of Zionist ideology and European modernist movements.
“Spirit of Stone” pays homage to those early showcases of Eretz Israel art – with its often romanticized play on the stone, sand, and light of British Mandate-era Jerusalem. This section of “The Jerusalem School” presents Jerusalem as a subject of longing and study – embodying the perpetual quest for a new Hebrew form and language as seen from the earliest days of the founding of the Bezalel School of Art by Boris Schatz – and extending to the expressions in the works of lesser-known contributors, such as prominent German avant-garde artist Elsa Lasker-Schuller. She was forced to leave Nazi Germany and exchange her former comfortable life for an almost destitute existence in Israel, where she was considered crazy.
“The exhibition is really asking ‘Who were those people who came here? What were their ideologies and drives?’ And how Jerusalem and the reflections of Jerusalem... in the arts, tell the story, their story and ours,” Kobo said.
“You can see how they viewed [the Jewish] people around them: religious, Orientalist, Oriental. You can see that they were at the same time a little bit stunned by the difference between them, but also very much drawn to the East. They saw the Eastern magic.”
IN BOTH sections of the exhibition, Jerusalem is the hero, Kobo said.
“From the beginning of the 20th century until today, Jerusalem and its artistic works have touched on the exposed nerves of Jewish and Israeli identity.
“In retrospect, it seems that Jerusalem’s artistic work has a clear character, with Jerusalem itself playing a very important role: holy, spiritual Jerusalem next to the uniqueness of daily life in the city and the zeitgeist that decidedly influences art created in the city in the past, and that continues to be created today,” she said.
“Forsaken Zone,” curated by HaMiffal’s Elad Yaron, explores Jerusalem’s sometimes explosive and rebellious modern art scene and its relationship to the cityscape and its history. Blood-red rock taken from a pile of rocks left by a contractor at the low-income Katamonim neighborhood and reclaimed by artist Shlomo Vazan in 1986 commands the center of one of the exhibition spaces.
Portraits painted by graduates of Musrara, the Naggar Interdisciplinary School of Art and Society, highlight the leaders of the Israeli Black Panther protest movement comprised of second-generation Jewish immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The now-rusty and broken metal Holy Ark by Guy David Briller (used in a performance art piece in 2010) is displayed in all its crooked glory in the center hall. A reproduction by David Cohen of a Torah ark curtain – with gaping bullet holes – shaped like the library door of the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva, where a 2008 terror attack killed eight students, hangs as a solemn memorial of the attack. Yael Shimoni’s towering image of doors within doors inspired by etchings on the first page of religious books and the layout of a page of Talmud, splashed with red paint to signify the Passover sacrificial blood, created before Oct. 7, takes on a more powerful significance following the Hamas massacre.
“The nearly prophetic aspect of many of the works again reveals just how Jerusalem’s art serves as a microcosm of the space we live in,” Yaron wrote in the introduction of “Forsaken Zone.”
The exhibition seeks to offer a new reading and to delve deep into the alternative arena which has blossomed in the city from the 1960s until today, in the belief that Jerusalem art is “local” in the deepest sense of the word – connected to the historical Jerusalem – of dreams and ideals – while operating in an “underground city” in relation to contemporary political, religious, and social events.
SAVE FOR a work by artist Hannan Abu-Hussein, originally from Umm al-Fahm, the only other Palestinian voice in Jerusalem art is represented by a blank wall where the work of an artist resident in the city was slated to hang. After Oct. 7, the artist declined to have his work shown there for the sake of his reputation – but he agreed to a placard with the words in Arabic “Present, absent” in its place, symbolizing the present absence of the Arab population.
“The people whose works are shown in the Tower of David came from different countries to begin with. The people being exhibited here [Hamiffal] were born in Israel, but both groups are searching for their identity,” said Yaron.
“They are searching for what it means to live in Jerusalem, what it means to come here or to be born here. It’s not as different as we would tend to think because still... as those born in Israel many, many years later, we need to ask and answer these questions: ‘Why are we here? What do we want to do with our lives? And if we are staying here, then why?’ We need to find answers to those questions. And it’s always an identity quest. I think this is one thing that connects both worlds.
“There are still so many questions after so many wars and so many sorrows. So many people need – again and again – to discover their identity. And in Jerusalem, they tend to need to scream it.”■
