Musrara Mix has long been one of the main envelope pushers on the Jerusalem – if not the national – art scene. The event is about to run for the 24th time, under the auspices of Musrara, the Naggar School of Art and Society, in Musrara, the sociopolitical-cultural interface neighborhood of the capital, May 28-30.
As usual, the three-day agenda covers numerous artistic, disciplinary, and philosophical bases. However, as curator Vera Korman points out, there is unfortunately one major difference this year. “In the wake of October 7 and the war we decided not to call this year’s event ‘a festival,’” she says.
This was not just a moniker issue. The whole thinking and direction of the event underwent a major makeover. “I normally start planning the next Musrara Mix around October or November,” Korman explains. The start of the programming assignment was knocked on the head from the off.
“The war changed everything. We wondered whether we would hold the event at all. It was paralyzing.”
Thankfully, Korman regained her curatorial composure and called in the artistic troops to see if they could help refashion the lineup accordingly. “We decided to stay with the theme of time, but the idea of ‘beauty’ was challenging for us. But we would have an exhibition or arrange events.”
The thematic banner is “Trapped Time.” It was a matter of adapting to the abruptly changing circumstances and taking a more introspective look at what was on offer.
“We started to think of time in terms of war time, and I and Eran Sachs, head of the artistic director of the Music Department – we regularly collaborate in the field of audio-visual – we decided we had to convene and think about artists from close to home, about student exhibitions, and to think more in the direction of people we already know, to talk about how to create at this time.” If the program of Musrara Mix 24 is anything to go by, those discussions went pretty well.
In truth, the chosen topic left plenty of room for intellectual and creative maneuver. Time is the most flexible, yet frustrating, of elements. We never seem to have enough of it, despite the ever-increasing proliferation of “time-saving” hi-tech gadgets. But, then, we may find ourselves standing in line for something and, suddenly, time seems to have stood still. And, if nothing else, the COVID lockdown period taught us that, if we manage to shift our cerebral gears, we might find we have oceans of time at our disposal.
It is, clearly, a matter of subjective temporal reasoning.
“We thought about the program in terms of sections. The first one was a loop,” says Korman. “The second one was a loop as something that repeats – as a place where repetitions serve as a warning. We thought about the concept of non-linearity as a means for thinking in a humane way, and achieving conflict resolution. When you think in linear terms there is always someone to blame – who started the fight? Where did the story begin? Where will it end?”
PRESUMABLY, THE answer to that does not exactly point the way to a “happily ever after” scenario. But, Korman feels, art can help to offer alternative pathways ahead.
“I think that when artists do something that deconstructs the theme, the linearity, there we can perhaps find the human element, the truly human.”
The third section of the programming venture referred to the concept of nightmare, of time and place. “There was the sense that we couldn’t think of tomorrow. We didn’t know what would come the next day. But, in the sense that tomorrow might be even more terrible – but we don’t know just how bad it might be.”
That doesn’t sound too spiritually uplifting, but Korman says she and her fellow artists were keen to dig into things and hopefully break them down into more manageable dimensions.
Most of the events will take place at the Canada House community center on Shivtei Yisrael Street, with some at the main school building and at the Silesian Sisters Pilgrims’ Home on nearby Ha’ayin Het Street.
The dozens of slots in the program divide into four broad categories – exhibitions, music, performance, and installation and video works. There are intriguing offerings right through the lineup. The Italian Christian facility, for example, hosts a musical creation by Ruth Wieder Magen and Or Mai, which goes by the evocative title of When Women Were Birds, and is described as “two women meet on opposite edges of acoustic space and life processes sharing primary echoes, texts, and vibrational windings.” The two-parter opens with Cloister – “Sculpting Voice in Space,” followed by Animism – “Experiences in Human Extensions.” Then there is Musical Act by internationally acclaimed bass clarinetist, composer, and sound designer Yoni Silver which should go some way to expanding our listening experience.
Following on from the Bard’s hypothesis that “all the world’s a stage” I suggest that practically everything we do in life is some sort of “performance.” “That’s true,” Korman concurs. “Today there are departments at universities, like Cornell [in upstate New York], which approach anthropology and history through the prism of performance.”
Artist and filmmaker Jonathan Omer Mizrahi’s Copy Farm certainly addresses the current sorrowful zeitgeist. The Musrara Mix program notes describe his work as an exploration of “power relations with projects that transpire at the encounter of creativity and emergency.” The latter juxtaposition raises the clichéd specter of the artist going through the emotional and corporeal mill in an effort to give birth to some creative fruit worth its salt. “I call him an anthropologist of images,” says Korman. “He is a collector of images.”
Copy Farm sees Mizrahi present a video installation performative lecture, in which he returns to his youth as a night club VJ and mixes, in real-time, images that touch on land and territory, agriculture, nationalism, sexuality, war, and hi-tech.“One of the things that motivated me as a curator this time, at such a time of crisis, is that turning to art is a sort of act of movement and vitality in the world which goes in the opposite direction, towards destruction,” Korman observes. “We have to turn to the other path. We have to demand creativity and life.”
Hopefully, the eclectic, diverse, and adventuresome pickings to be had at Musrara Mix will provide us with some of the life affirmation we all need.
For more information: musraramix.com/2024/en/about-2/
