Call for Applications for Artist’s Workspace

Next deadline: 30.11.09

Visual artists,  sound artists, designers, architects, curators, and researchers in the arts, are invited to submit applications for a workspace at Mamuta.

Recipients of the workspace will be entitled to the following:

• A workspace in the open studio or in the labs
• Access to video, sound, and electronics labs; wood workshop
• Opportunity to participate in Mamuta’s enrichment workshops for a nominal fee
• Support and professional guidance on technical and artistic matters
• Encounters with artists, curators, and researchers from Israel and abroad
• Funding opportunities for project development.

In order to submit your application, please follow the link or enter Mamuta’s website

The year 1961 marked the entry of the voice of the repressed Israeli “other” into the heart of the local discourse upon the opening of the Eichmann Trial at Israel’s Congress Center in Jerusalem. This formative event presented to the Israeli public, for the first time, the voices of the survivors who served as witnesses. Later on, Hannah Arendt would write in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem about Eichmann’s testimony: “It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”¹

In the very same year of the Eichmann Trial, Stanley Milgram conducted his famous experiment in social psychology, “Obedience to Authority,” at Yale’s Department of Psychology. He wanted to prove the argument that collaborators with the Nazi extermination program were “merely following orders.” The experiment explored the influence of authority on human subjects and the limit to which those subjects were prepared to obey an authoritative figure who instructed them to perform acts contrary to their values. The first series of experiments indicated that 65% of the participants agreed to administer seemingly real electric shocks of increasing intensity, from 15 to 450 volts, to another individual only because a figure of authority had instructed them to do so. While some voiced objection to the instruction and the act, none of the participants stopped the experiment before reaching 300 volts.

The exhibition “Evil to the Core” addresses issues pertaining to docility and obedience to authority, conformism, social responsibility, disobedience, and non-conformism in general, and in Israeli society specifically. The exhibition combines different materials, works of art, and documentary films exploring socialization, obedience, power, authority, and resistance. Three major methods run through them: simulation, experimentation, and reconstruction or reenactment, which may be regarded as methods shaping the reality of the present.

Repetition, Artur Zmijewski

Amir Yatziv’s Detroit consists of a map which the artist found in a military training area, a video piece, and photographs. The title of the installation was borrowed from the IDF’s training area near Ze’elim in the country’s southern region. Is it accidental that an IDF training area was named after the American city of Detroit, once a bustling metropolis, and now a ghost town of sorts? “Detroit” is a 1:1 simulation of a Palestinian city of identical area. The simulation generates an alternative reality (at times sterile) which conceals the true reality. The fictive reality becomes a source for rich, luring stimuli, that may often overshadow the actual experience of reality, as in the case of movie towns, Disneyland, or “war games” held at the highest echelons of the military system.

In the video work accompanying the installation, Yatziv presents the architectural plans of the Israeli “Detroit” to various urban planners, asking them to analyze the city for him. They all express varying measures of discontent with the city plan, but none realizes that it is a city constructed for the sole purpose of simulation. The mosque architect is baffled by the fact that such a tall mosque was erected for a city of such scale, whereas another urban planner wonders why, in this new city, no road was paved to facilitate vehicular traffic between the commercial center and the residential neighborhoods.

The training city “Detroit” was intended to prepare soldiers for combat in a built-up area. It resembles a Muslim quarter, thus meeting the users’ needs in a simulation which would furnish them with a fantasy of an Arab city. The essence of this city is replaced by its fictive image. “Detroit” even contains live targets. A private company supplies extras with an “Eastern” look to play the Palestinians in the simulation. Is “Detroit” a simulation that went out of control during the operation in Gaza? The Gazan “Detroit” is devoid of flowering gardens; the city’s residents are mere extras, and the houses contain no books or any other sign of life. The simulation prepares the fighter for “better” confrontation in real time, striving to neutralize the element of surprise in battle by exercising which dulls the shock of encounter with the real. The simulation enables distant confrontation, based on previous experiences, and not on the initial encounter in the battlefield; at the same time, it might establish automatic patterns of action and cause numbness.²

David Reeb, Ni’ilin 1.5.2009,

On April 4, 1968, Jane Elliott, a third grade teacher in Iowa, USA, turned on her television set to discover that Martin Luther King had been assassinated. There, in her living room, she decided to teach her 8-year old pupils a lesson in racism. The very next day, Tuesday April 5, she held the first experiment in racism in her classroom: she declared her blue-eyed pupils superior to the rest, bestowing upon them privileges at the expense of the others. Blue-eyed and brown-eyed pupils were disallowed to drink from the same drinking fountains. The latter were asked to wear a special collar around their necks denoting their inferiority. The blue-eyed students became almost automatically haughty, bossy, and cruel toward their brown-eyed peers. The next day, the roles were reversed—the brown-eyed pupils became the superior, whereas the blue-eyed became an untouchable minority.

Elliott, whose experiment is documented in the film The Eye of the Storm (director: William Peters) screened in the exhibition, conceived of a simulation which corresponds with the reality by which American society (like many other societies) chooses to compartmentalize itself according to racist-ethnic terms. In order to illustrate to her pupils to what extent such division is, in fact, based on prejudice and ignorance, she made them experience a process of re-socialization by means of a game of role reversal between privileged and inferior. In each of the experiment’s two days the pupils played different roles, learning first hand about the feelings of privileged versus underprivileged, experiencing the dehumanization generated by such a system.

The film documenting Elliott’s work (the exercise was subsequently developed for use with different groups, other than primary school children, and even repeated with adults) proves that ethnic, or any other division which allows for oppression of the other, requires little time to produce social structures and patterns. Ethnic and national divisions create affiliation groups based on physical or other relations of likeness, isolating or pushing aside groups which do not meet the parameters defining the group. This process is accompanied by either bestowal or denial of privileges and by domination via denial or erasure of the other’s rights.

In 2002 the Israeli government established the Immigration Administration, now better known as the “Oz Unit.” The Administration was allotted a considerable budget, field units, and motor vehicles. Labor migrants call the unit “Fifty Two Fifty” since the Unit’s cars’ license plates always begin with 52 and end with 50. Uri Bar-On, director of 52/50, decided to focus on the violence perpetrated by the Oz Unit policemen during their operations to capture illegal labor migrants. For the production of the film Bar-On harnessed students from the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, and purchased several video cameras. He set up a call center to collect reports about police raids, and transfer the information to the film crews on site. Days and nights Bar-On went with student teams to follow the activities of the Immigration Police. His film crews documented Oz Unit raids on apartments and mobile homes in which migrants live, as well as their arrests on the street. They documented the immigrants’ stories about the policemen’s violence towards them. The film shows, among other things, how the Immigration Police often detain foreign nationals and harasses them merely because of their foreign appearances. This was the case with a doctor in the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center who was arrested together with an Israeli who tried to protect her from the violence of the Unit’s cops.

Apart from documentation of the Immigration Police violence, the film endeavors to examine whether the camera’s presence and students’ presence during the arrest of labor migrants will decrease the level of violence used by the Immigration Police during these arrests.

In Machssomim, Yoav Shamir follows soldiers serving in the Occupied Territories, entrusted with roadblock duty. As in the case of the Oz Unit, here too there is an encounter with a different community, and the soldier has the power to decide how the Palestinian’s day will begin or end. The film documents the encounter of Israeli soldiers posted at various checkpoints in the Occupied Territories with the Palestinian population wishing to pass through these crossings and roadblocks between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and even between villages or towns within the Palestinian Authority. Observation of the film underscores the lack of clarity regarding the policy or position the soldiers are supposed to exercise toward civilian population. There seems to be no clear instruction what is allowed and what is forbidden at the checkpoint, what language may be used, who is allowed to pass and why. The film presents the confusion of some of the soldiers who are given control over the lives of others, but do not know how to use that power. At the same time, it also presents those who take the responsibility given them too far, using it to exercise power and to humiliate those requiring the services of passage through the checkpoint.

In both films the photographed subjects are aware of the camera’s presence, yet we are not told whether this presence changed their behavior: whether the Immigration cops exercised less power or whether the soldiers in the checkpoint exercised greater discretion during their shift. The exposure to an Israeli camera is exposure to the Israeli public which largely supports the soldiers’ activity at the checkpoints or the activities of the Oz unit, hence it does not cause the photographed subjects inner conflict.

Rod Dickinson, Detail from The Milgram Re-enactment (2002)

Rod Dickinson’s works progress along the axis between simulation and reconstruction, exploring ideas pertaining to belief and social control. The works present events which were supposed to take place, yet ultimately did not, or alternatively—events that have taken place. In the exhibition, Dickinson presents The Milgram Re-enactment (2002)  (in collaboration with Graeme Edler and Steve Rushton) consisting of an installation reconstructing Stanley Milgram’s laboratory in detail, alongside a video reenacting the experiment with actors. The work offers viewers sensory confrontation by virtue of the physical presence in the laboratory, which calls to mind a return to a crime scene to study the evidence and experience them up close. By means of the reconstruction the artist generates a system of simulation as part of which the viewer can participate in the experience.

Milgram’s experiment is one of the most important and provocative ever to be carried out in the field of social psychology, and it is still studied. It was repeated once by Milgram himself, and several more times by psychologists and social psychology laboratories, each time altering one element of the experiment. In all cases the participants were told that the experiment was a memory and learning test. They did not know that they were taking part in an experiment about obedience. The subjects were ostensibly given the choice between the roles of teacher and learner; the latter was, in fact, an active partner to the experiment and was let in on the secret. The teacher (subject) sat in one room with the researcher; the latter wore a white smock and observed from behind the teacher’s back. In front of the teacher was a box with multiple switches (an electric shock machine), with the voltage level marked above each switch. Even the marking of lethal high voltage did not stop the majority of the participants from continuing.

Some ten years after Milgram’s experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment conceived by Philip Zimbardo, Milgram’s classmate at the James Monroe High School in the Bronx (class of 1950) was performed. The experiment studied the participants’ confrontation with prison reality. Several offices in the basement of Stanford University’s Psychology building were cleared, and fitted with bars. Via a newspaper ad, male college students were recruited and randomly divided into the roles of prisoners and guards. The former were “arrested” by the local police and led blindfolded and handcuffed to Zimbardo’s mock prison, where they were stripped naked, disinfected and dressed in prisoners’ uniform by the “guards.” The latter were given warden uniforms and full freedom to exercise authority. The experiment, which was supposed to continue for a fortnight, went out of hand on the second day, with the prisoners’ mutiny attempt, which was forcefully suppressed by the prison guards. It was terminated prematurely after six days, and was never reenacted scientifically on ethical grounds.

In his video Repetition, artist Artur Zmijewski reenacts and documents Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Zmijewski placed an advertisement in the newspaper, offering readers to take part in an experiment for hourly pay. The experiment continued for seven days, and as with Zimbardo’s prison experiment, the participants were randomly selected to perform the roles of prisoners or guards. Zmijewski, like Zimbardo, took upon himself the role of superintendent of the temporary prison, wholly devoting himself to his self-assumed role. In Zmijewski’s work we evince the power relations constructedbetween prisoners and guards within days. Unlike the original experiment, the prisoners and guards in this work choose to protest against the prison manager, collectively deciding to end the experiment.

The reenactment used by Dickinson and Zmijewski may be construed as a staged, ritual modus operandi at work in many apparatuses. It is intended to cleanse the collective conscience and heal the wounds. The reenactment has a symbolical theatrical dimension: taking an intricate, often emotional event, encoding it into an easily digestible product and providing local rationalization, a process which makes for an illusion of order. The reenactment dissociates the past from any sentiment in an attempt to rejuvenate reality which has crumbled at that point; therefore it occurs outside time, as it were.

Noam Gelbart’s animation piece Experiment 5.6.5/10 depicts an (imaginary) experiment in randomly selected subjects who were told that they were selected due to their alleged superior qualities. The subjects were given a random set of laws and rules which they had to obey. In return, they were told, they will feel a considerable improvement in their quality of life. The ostensibly arbitrary rule list was extracted from Jewish rabbinic law. In the third week of the experiment, one of the participants succeeds in exploiting the paradigm in his favor, thereby garnering status and power. He becomes a mentor and an educator capable of giving instruction on his own. From here the path is short to full and violent destruction of the experiment.

Experiment 5.6.5/10 from Noam Gelbart on Vimeo.

Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiments were preceded by Dr. D. Ewen Cameron’s CIA-funded experiment held in Canada between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, which set out to examine whether it is possible to blot out past behavioral patterns and reconstruct new ones in their place. In order to eliminate existing behavioral conditioning, Dr. Cameron gave the subjects electric shocks far beyond the level allowed at the time. He drugged his patients with hallucinatory drugs and various stimulants, putting them in a state of unconsciousness which lasted many weeks. Simultaneously, he repeated to them instructions for new behavioral patterns. Cameron succeeded in eliminating his patients’ past behavioral habits, but he was never able to prove that the soul’s shattering and transformation into a blank slate (tabula rasa) could indeed facilitate construction of new patterning or healing of the patients who came to him seeking help. An investigation of the American Senate revealed the existence of numerous such experiments exported from the United States to other countries, attesting to their faulty nature.

Cameron’s modi operandi are nowadays exercised throughout the world by people who are considered normative, following instructions from above under pretexts of scientific research, national security, and state of emergency, while releasing the individual performing them from personal liability. These modi operandi include isolation of the studied subject from contact with reality by means of sensory isolation, including white noise played incessantly, blindfolding to outside images, covering the hands, and disruption of sleeping and eating patterns by detachment from the outside or from any other element that preserves a temporal continuum.

The film Total Isolation (from the series “Horizon” produced by the BBC) documents an experiment conducted on several subjects, who volunteered to suffer sensory deprivation for 48 hours. The subjects were given an identical cognitive test before and after the experiment. During the experiment they experienced different levels of sensory deprivation, after which a decrease in their cognitive functioning was clearly registered.

The film The Human Behavior Experiment (director: Alex Gibney) links Milgram and Zimbardo’s experiments, addressing the mechanism producing blind obedience or submission to power, events where systems of power are at work, which allow for domination of others’ lives, and the way in which this power is exercised destructively when the system does not lay rules which clearly restrict the use of force or the domination of others. For example, the soldiers posted at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, who abused prisoners suspected of various activities against the American military government. Interviews with these soldiers reveal that during their duty as prison guards, they thought they were optimally following the orders given them. Their own photographs present abuse, humiliation, and torture suffered by the prisoners which call to mind the methods of Dr. Cameron and Zimbardo. Excluding one interrogator, who documented and publicized what he saw at Abu Ghraib, the majority of soldiers blindly obeyed orders and never asked themselves whether they were legal, and whether they can indeed be relieved of responsibility for the very prisoners for whom they were responsible. They did not ask themselves whether their actions were abusive and humiliating, violating the other’s basic rights or humanity.

In Israeli Tamar Yarom’s film, To See if I’m Smiling , a harsh picture arises from the testimonies of six female ex-soldiers, who describe their intoxication with power and lack of differentiation between good and bad during their military service, includinghaving their pictures taken with the bodies of Palestinian interogees who had been tortured. The film consists of a set of interviews with women who served in the Occupied Territories. Several years after their service they look back at their military past which haunts them, trying to confront the civilian reality in relation to the time they had served as soldiers. The monologues of the film’s six protagonists indicate distress, suffering, and guilt feelings. It is incomprehensible how they could have been so easily pulled into a world of wrongdoing and acts of violence perpetrated by soldiers against citizens and detainees; why they agreed to collaborate, to be a part of the system of silencing which kept the squadron’s secrets?

The delayed confession is perceived as akin to assuming responsibility and confrontation with the past, especially since the exposure of the secret is public, and often involves pain and admission of guilt without a trial. The disclosure, in this case, is media exposure, demanding daily confrontation of the guilt. Simultaneously, an act of transference takes place, whereby anyone who listens to the confession or admission assumes responsibility by virtue of the knowledge, absorbing part of it from the confessor.

Avi Mograbi’s film Z32 centers on an ex-soldier in an elite unit who participated in an act of revenge for the murder of six Israeli soldiers, an action in which two Palestinian policemen were murdered. He confesses and reconstructs the killing event for his life partner and the viewers. His testimony relates to his part in the murder and to the charged feelings that have burdened him since. In the film, the ex-soldier reconstructs the night of the event several times to his partner. In addition, he returns to the scene of the incident with Mograbi, and reenacts the revenge for him. Much like a murder reenactment which is invalid as judicial evidence, yet serves as confession to a crime committed, albeit not judicial, in this case, too, the reconstruction and the repetition of the killing process combine personal with collective guilt, the desire for absolution with reconstruction of the power intoxication during the military revenge. To us, viewers, the act of reconstruction serves as a type of catalyst for cleansing our consciences, through participation which does not require assuming responsibility.

Artist David Reeb’s video work, Ni’ilin 1.5.2009, begins with a tear gas canister fired into the yard of a house where the owners and political activists (“Anarchists against the Wall”) are present.³ Directly thereafter, a group of Border Guard fighters climb to the roof of the house. The soldiers present no document authorizing them to penetrate the house, even when they are asked to do so. In order to scare off the activists, they throw tear gas at them and at the house owners from the roof. The roof serves the soldiers as an observation and firing post at demonstrators in the streets near the house. When they climb off the roof and leave the family home, one of the commanders says to his subordinate who stands next to him: “We must detain them, and you don’t do that. You have to enter their homes at 2 AM and arrest them, before they ever come here.” Reeb documents this moment in the video in his painting Bougainvillea. He isolates the preliminary event by painting one frame from the video, featuring several soldiers marching on a dirt road, and next to them a flowering bougainvillea shrub sprawling beyond the yard of the house.

The presence of “Anarchists against the Wall” disturbs the soldiers’ work. The Anarchists refuse to take for granted the force exercised by the soldiers and submit to it. They always demand to check whether each and every act taken by the soldiers—in this case, entry into the home of a Palestinian citizen—was authorized. The Anarchists group exercises its civic power; it does not obey the code which determines that the physically strong is the dominant. This introduces a nuisance or generates confrontation with the soldiers who must address their demand, which is opposed to the approach of the majority of soldiers toward the Palestinians whom they regard as unequal; the Palestinians houses and property are perceived as territory subject to control, hence, they believe, the soldiers are not forced to obey civilian laws, at times not even the laws of the army.

Eyal Eithcowich, director of the film Enraged, follows the story of four members of the activist group “Anarchists against the Wall” through their struggle. The group’s activity has met with harsh oppression by the State. Hundreds of Palestinians and scores of Israelis and foreign nationals have been injured, and hundreds of arrests have led to dozens of indictments. Nevertheless, the group continues its activity, refusing to forgo the message of refusal to be enemies and the partnership in a popular struggle against the Occupation. The film depicts the group’s activity and the violence in the Occupied Territories; a horror vision in which soldiers, settlers, leftist activists, and local Arab citizens all take part. Eithcowich lets the images, which are often powerful and elusive (especially the depictions of confrontations during demonstrations), speak for themselves, rarely intervening.

“Anarchists against the Wall” was established in 2003 with the intention of operating against the“Separation Wall” erected by Israel on Palestinian land in the West Bank. Since its inception, the group has worked in close collaboration with the Palestinians in a joint popular struggle against the Wall in the West Bank, the siege, and the attacks on Gaza specifically, and against the Occupation in general. Over the years, group members have participated in hundreds of demonstrations: whether in West Bank villages and towns organized by Palestinian local popular committees or in Israel proper intended to present the Occupation and its harm to the Israeli public, and to call upon the public to join in the struggle. “As Israelis we are well aware of the privileges granted us by the occupation regime, even when protesting against it. We can move relatively freely from place to place. The army and police forces are more hesitant in exercising extreme violence against us, and the civil law system to which we are subordinated gives us basic rights which our Palestinian partners are denied, since they are subject to military law. Therefore, we have chosen to transform these privileges into tools of solidarity to the best of our ability. The joint demonstrations are not only a political message regarding the very feasibility of cooperation, but also a way to stand by our Palestinian partners.”⁴

In David Tartakover’s series of photographs, I Am Here, the artist digitally inserted his figure into various events and places. On his body he wears an emergency services vest, yet Tartakover’s vest bears the word “Artist.” The images are press photographs from the Separation Wall in Abu Dis, from Qalqilya, Ras Atiya, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Hebron, always drawn from incidents related to the Occupation. Hebron 180303 depicts an IDF soldier holding his weapon in the foreground. At another level of the photograph, the inscription “Are you Jewish? Yes=life No=death” may be read on the back of a T-shirt. Tartakover’s figure is seen in the background, wearing his “Artist” vest, as if he were a witness to the photographed event not by virtue of his actually being there, but rather due to the fact that he inserts his figure into the photographed event. By positioning himself within various acts taking place around him, Tartakover assumes responsibility: he places himself as both an observer who does not look away from the occurrences and as a witness who brings to us his testimony, motivated by the knowledge that the freedom for individual opinion is not a right, but a duty. Disregard for personal responsibility does not release the individual from responsibility for the actions of the society in which he lives. All the members of the collective share in the responsibility, and they all have the right to doubt and explore whether they want to be a part of it. Refusal to take responsibility for the actions of society and setting oneself apart from it forms an existential threat to that society. Disobedience (resistance), on the other hand, is an attempt to correct society, rather than to undermine it. The conscientious objector functions as an agent of morality who operates for the sake of social change, since obedience contradicts his moral principles. The conscientious objector does not disregard the law, and the collective does not have to acknowledge his rightness. The duty is to acknowledge conscientious objection as part of honoring human dignity and freedom. Disobedience takes place vis-à-vis the leadership of society, when each individual is given the right to protest, via an act of objection, against instructions which contradict his personal moral values.

Leading an individual life in keeping with an independent moral agenda is utopian, and can fully occur only under laboratory conditions. Such individual existence is eliminated by the presence of others, and is based on the relationship with them. This system makes the individual suspend his ethics, his personal checks and balances, and to “assimilate” into the collective paradigm. It is an expression of the individual’s mental dependence on authority, manifested by his voluntary integration into a hierarchical system. In return the individual is granted relief stemming from the detachment from personal liability by virtue of “belonging” to a collective. It is this belonging that lends the collective its power. The individual is the arbitrary signifier of the collective, and the function of authority is to eliminate his personal characteristics (his personal imprint) so that he may serve as a pawn representing something beyond his personality; this act inevitably eliminates the significance of the other as well.

15-17 October, Ein Karem, Jerusalem

Participants: Yoaw Weiss, Wanja Schaub, Hadas Ophrat, Tamar Shippony, Einat Amir, Guy Itzhaki, Tamar Schori, Hannan Abu Hussein, Victoria Hanna, Lenny Ben-Bassat, Eldad Cideaur, Yonatan Ullman, Liraz Pank, Thalia Hoffman, Elad Schechter, Lezli Rubin-Kunda, Guy Briller, Leora Wise, Iris Pshedezki, Shiri Lanton, Hanna Ben-Hayim Yulzary, Yifat Laist, Zehavit Stern, “maayan magazine”, Hachalalit – Hayarkon 70, Mamuta Kollectiv

curators: sala-manca group

Hours and days of the event:
Thursday 15th October: 15:00-23:00 Art Event
Friday 16th October: 9:30-13:00 symposium
Saturday 17th October: 11:00 – 14:00 Bridge Tournament. 15:00 – 23:00 Art Event

Madregot Habikur St, Ein Karem, to the right of the maayan spring [MAP]
Free Shuttles from Har Herzl Parking (Please park there!!!)
Bring warm clothes
*Bring MP3 to download for free the audio tours
*Bring T-shirts to print souvenirs on them

Entrance: 30 nis
Symposium and Bridge Tournament: Free Entrance
For more info, updates and map: www.mamuta.org

About the Event

What’s Hidden Behind the Pastoral? is an art project in which more than thirty artists present installations, performances, tours, and shows dealing with the past, present, and future of Ein Karem. The project explores the history of the village from biblical times, through its epoch as a Palestinian village, and until its present day as a Jewish neighborhood of West Jerusalem and a primary object of desire for big real-state projects. These are the central themes that the artists deal with at the project. This series of actions examines the place of the pastoral in Israeli art in general and its implications on Ein Karem specifically. The event is also the formal opening to the public of the Mamuta at the Daniela Passal Art and Media Center, which has been operating since February 2009 in the house of the late artist Daniela Passal, thanks to her generosity. Mamuta is a joint project of the Jerusalem Foundation and the Sala-manca group.

Works and projects that will be held and presented at the event:

1. The presentation of some twenty five actions, media installations, and performances by different artists
2. Open Source Souvenir Shop Project (OSSS). At the Shop, the public will be able to create souvenirs of the event and of Ein Karem, with free access to some of the images of the artists’ works.
3. Audio tours of Ein Karem will be offered, creating a new and multi-layered narrative of the village: the visitors are invited to go set out on a hike with a map and an MP3 of guided tours made up of different voices that present the history of Ein Karem from different points of view.
4. Throughout the event and in real time, three groups—each comprised of a poet, a photographer, a theoretician, an editor, and a graphic designer—will head out on a safari with a personal guide, to collect and create materials. Each group will produce and design its own catalogue for the event. The catalogues will be printed on the site and the public will have the opportunity to choose between the different catalogues—different records of the same event
5. Friday October 16, from 9:30 to 13:00: Symposium on the curation and creation of art in contested spaces, with the participation of Galit Eilat, Charles Esche and Danna Tagar.
6. Saturday October 17, from 11:00 to 14:00: Bridge tournament between the local ladies’ team and guests of the event.

Background

The Center’s location demands in our view a treatment of the historical and ideological complexity of the loaded landscape: the landscape of the village of Ein Karem and the village of Ein Karem as landscape.

The central project that guides us at Mamuta, and which gives this lecture its title, is: “What’s Hidden Behind the Pastoral?”

One of Mamuta’s main challenges is its location and history and the need to observe and confront that very same spatial pastorality, which is essentially a window into understanding Israeli reality in the broadest sense. Through “What’s Hidden Behind the Pastoral?” we take a critical look at the geographic and historical space of Ein Karem; we deal with the representation of the landscape and the relationship of the landscape with notions of power and nation; and we explore the connection between art, media, and technology, and the Israeli landscape as an arena for events and critical artistic production in general and in the representation of Israeliness in particular.

According to jewish the tradition, Ein Karem is the ancient Beit HaKarem as recorded in the Bible (Jeremiah 6:1, Nehemia 3:14).According to the Christian tradition, Ein Karem is the birthplace of John the Baptist. In the Byzantine era, churches were built there that are connected to the name of John the Baptist and his family, and to this day Ein Karem is considered a holy place for Christianity and a site of pilgrimage.

In the thirteenth century, the village was conquered by the arabs forces of Omar al-Khatav ,. In the nineteenth century, the village, home to both Christians and Muslims, developed into a site of pilgrimage for Christians from around the world and also a site for the cultivation of olives and the production of olive oil.

In the 1948 war—which ended with Independence for Israel, and catastrophe, or Nakba, for the Palestinians—the village was conquered by Israeli army forces. Most of the residents of the village fled before the army came in, following attacks on neighboring villages . After the property was confiscated, the State began to settle the village with Jewish refugees and immigrants from various countries. A youth agricultural school was established there over the years , and in the 1980s Ein Karem became a central tourist spot in Jerusalem, bringing about a rise in real estate prices and an influx of wealthy residents.

Ein Karem is one of the few Arab villages that was not destroyed by the Israeli army during or after the 1948 war, and it amazingly preserves the pre-1948 architecture of the village.

The history of the village, the history of the representation of the landscape in Israeli art and a criticism on the dominant pastoral perspective in the area in which the Center is located are the central subjects of the long-term project that will occupy us and the center for the coming years,. This project will be comprised of a series of actions, events, exhibits, and performances dealing with the present, the past, and the future of Ein Karem. The project will take place, will be produced and presented at Mamuta and its environs through collaboration with different institutions and neighbors. It is a project in stages, with different stops in which its opening date is known (this October 15-17) but its completion date is unknown.

02 – A short movie about Jerusalem by Uri Crystal from uganda on Vimeo.

We are seeking architects, graphic designers and video artists to join us for a period of intense work of between two and eight weeks. Those joining us would be received in a live-work residency and would benefit from various cultural and political engagements in Palestine.*

If you are interested to join us please send your one page CV and work samples to rchitects, Graphic Designers, Video Artists: The project Decolonizing Architecture, directed by architects Sandi Hilal, Alessandro Petti and Eyal Weizman and located in Bethlehem/Palestine, is dealing with a complicated architectural problem: How to deal with the future remnants of Israeli colonial Architecture – colonies and military camps – at a time these would be unplugged from the architectural political power of Israel’s regime of occupation. Architecture is used as an “arena of speculation” about possible futures for Palestine, but the project assumes as well that a viable approach to this issue is beyond the professional language of architecture and planning and incorporates varied cultural and political perspectives.

We are seeking architects, graphic designers and video artists to join us for a period of intense work of between two and eight weeks. Those joining us would be received in a live-work residency and would benefit from various cultural and political engagements in Palestine.*

If you are interested to join us please send your one page CV and work samples to Alessandro Petti (info [at] decolonizing [dot] ps) noting when and for how long you wish to come to Palestine.

*The project provides a residency – studio and living space – in a comfortable house in Beit Sahur/Bethlehem, the travel expenses as well as some daily living expenses would have to be covered by the volunteering architects/designers/artists.

Grigorii Riazhskii, Chairwoman of the kolkhoz, 1932

The Philosophical Dictionary published in 1975 by the Political Literature Press in Moscow (editor: M. Rosental) offers the following definition for the artistic genre known as socialist realism: “An artistic method, whose essence is a historically true and concrete reflection of reality, captured in its revolutionary development… A new stage in the artistic growth of humankind. The essence of socialist realism: the truth of life as expressed in artistic images bespeaking a communist worldview.” To this essential definition one may add a concise historical one: the principles underlying this genre were defined and pronounced as binding at the first conference of Soviet writers, which took place in Moscow in 1934; it has since become associated with the notorious secretary of the party’s central committee, Andrei Zhdanov, who was responsible for executing Stalin’s cultural policies.

Even during its apogee (and all the more so today), socialist realism was viewed by the free-opinionated as an inferior genre, which reduces art to the level of vulgar propaganda. Why? The Philosophical Dictionary gladly answers this question, making clear that socialist realism is “a powerful tool for providing people with a communist education.” Above all, socialist realism fulfills a didactic role rather than providing mere entertainment, and as such does away with the term “leisure.” The substitution of ideological values for aesthetic ones naturally leads to a complete politicization of artmaking. Yet unlike traditional political art – such as the protest art that successfully served the Bolsheviks prior to the 1917 revolution – socialist realist art served to disseminate the values of those in power.

Socialist realism is based on distortion rather than on outright lying; at times, moreover, the distorting mirror may reflect the naked truth. It is for this reason that so many socialist realist artworks constitute important historical testimonies concerning the period in which they came into being.

Such art, moreover, strives towards a revolutionary transformation of the human worldview: just as dialectic materialism’s role is to analyze objective reality (as understood by the Marxists), so the principles of Marxism-Leninism in art serve to analyze a fictitious reality. One may even claim that socialist realism transforms creative inspiration into a science: “A historically true and concrete reflection of reality … which enables artists to examine the historical nature of the described phenomena and to properly reflect… not only the present and the past, but also the currents of future social developments.” If artists use the scientific tools offered by socialist realism, according to this statement, they will be able to predict the future. In this manner, Soviet artmaking was transformed into a branch of futurology, which one could describe either as a science or as a form of deception – based on the implicit guideline that life be depicted not as it is, but as it is “supposed” to be.

Vladimirskii, Future Engineer, 1930s

Does socialist realism thus amount to nothing more than a falsehood? The sworn enemies of political art will answer with an adamant “yes.” Popular wisdom, by contrast, treated this berated genre more gently, as is illustrated by the following joke: “There was once a lame king, who was also blind in one eye. This king ordered a painter to paint his portrait, and the painter depicted him as lame and blind in one eye. The king was furious, and ordered him to be executed. And so Realism was born. He called in another painter, who depicted him standing upright on both legs, with two seeing eyes. The king was angered by this distortion of reality, and ordered him to be executed. And so Impressionism was born. He called in a third painter, who painted the king sitting on his horse in profile, so that his lame leg and blind eye remained invisible. The king was satisfied, and ordered the painter to be appropriately rewarded. And so Socialist Realism was born.” Socialist realism is based on distortion rather than on outright lying; at times, moreover, the distorting mirror may reflect the naked truth. It is for this reason that so many socialist realist artworks constitute important historical testimonies concerning the period in which they came into being. A simple method for discovering the truth they embody is a straightforward process of inverting every factual or value-related statement; a more sophisticated method revolves around a thorough examination of these artworks, which involves cracking their ideological armor. The total suffocation of artistic freedom (the Philosophical Dictionary promises artists total freedom in choosing their style, and silently glosses over the question of content) caused socialist realist artists to develop a kind of outright cynicism. The classical examples of socialist realist art are ludicrous by any artistic or aesthetic measure (or ideological measure, one must add, even though the ideological dimension has a threatening aspect.). Indeed, it is hard to believe that they were created innocently; any intelligent viewer inevitably concludes that this twisting of the basic rules of good taste must amount to an intentional form of ridicule, a parody masquerading as the original – what eventually came to be described as “gesturing rudely inside one’s pocket.” Indeed, socialist realism did more to defame the Bolshevik regime than all the Sovietology treatises that slandered it in the West.

Vladimirskii, Roses for Stalin, 1949

From the safe distance of time, I shall now try to play devil’s advocate. First of all, I must counter the dismissive assertion that socialist realism amounts to a diversion from Russian art’s natural course of development, since it seemingly lacks any historical basis. This argument commits the same sin committed by this genre’s inventors: it attributes political traits to an artistic genre (albeit a supposedly artificial one), and thus effaces any possibility of finding artistic value in socialist realist works. In this manner, one may similarly discount the art scene that flourished in Samarkand in the early 15^th century, since it blossomed under the murderous tyranny of Timur-Leng. As a genre that has been in existence for several decades and which has undergone a series of developments, socialist realism cannot be regarded as a merely political phenomenon; its real artistic and historical roots must be examined. The birth of socialist realism was heralded not by Stalin, who had no real understanding of art, but rather by his greatest enemies – Trotskii and Lunacharskii – who were well-educated and sophisticated. Lunacharskii, who was put in charge of Soviet artistic life in the 1920s as the people’s commissar of the arts, was himself a respected playwright and literary critic. Defined by the Philosophical Dictionary as “a natural heir to the most celebrated realist traditions of the past,” socialist realism surely has roots that go deeper than the key literary event of 1934. Zhdanov’s decisive assertion that realism is the preferred artistic genre (an assertion that could be successfully fused with the Marxist principle according to which an analysis of the human condition must be based on existing reality employing the tools of reason) follows directly upon the spirit of conservative, bourgeois pre-revolutionary criticism, which angrily attacked the demonstrative formalism of the Russian avant-garde during the “Silver Age.” This criticism was itself based on the subversive literary realism that had developed during the 19^th century in the masterpieces of Tolstoy, Leskov, Garshin, Turgenev and Chekhov. This was a period during which writers were charged with redeeming the world, and literary and cultural criticism also served as an implicit form of public and political criticism. It is thus impossible to discount the reciprocal relations between Russian formalism and socialist realism – two entirely opposed yet historically adjacent streams of Russian art.

Socialist realism’s artistic contribution may be divided into two parts: works that have real artistic value despite their socialist realist style, and works whose real artistic value is due to their socialist realist style.

Indeed, socialist realism – which champions content and only content – was in its warped way a natural reaction to the feverish pursuit of literary form – a pursuit that was characteristic of the Russian avant-garde in general, and of “left-wing” Futurism and Imaginism in particular. It thus becomes apparent that the genre embodying the moral values of the new revolutionary world amounted to little more than a re-embodiment of respectable Russian conservatism.

Alexander Laktionov, To the New Apartment, 1952

All this said, it is difficult to avoid the rather despondent conclusion that the secondary, aesthetic power of socialist realism is not as ephemeral as its primary political power. Socialist realism’s artistic contribution may be divided into two parts: works that have real artistic value despite their socialist realist style, and works whose real artistic value is due to their socialist realist style. The first category does not concern us here, since it comprises the entire Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, ranging from the poet Mayakovskii to the directors Eisenstein, Vertov and Dovzhenko and to the founder of political photomontage, the Latvian Gustavs Klucis. Brecht, the most important German name in the history of modern theater, is also part of this list, as are somewhat less famous writers such as the French Louis Aragon, the Cuban Nicholas Guillen and the Jewish Alexander Pen. I shall now turn to focus on the second category, which is seemingly impossible: socialist realism that is good by its very definition as such.

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What makes a work of art good? Excluding a profound philosophical debate on this subject, the best general answer that applies, one should hope, to every case is: honesty and talent. In the context of the current discussion, honesty means the faith that art has the power to change reality in accordance with a given ideological paradigm. Since propaganda art must appeal to the masses, this ideological paradigm is naturally simplistic and uncomplicated (this argument touches upon the important distinction between “complicated” and “complex”). The role of such art is to provide the masses with a binary world view, which positions “us” against our “enemies.” Themes concerning the war against past enemies (literary and cinematic epics about the revolution and the Civil War, or about present and future dangers (”world imperialism” and its various derivatives), play a major role in Soviet socialist realism. In addition, many “internal enemies” required the socialist realist hero to go into battle, so that he could strengthen his character and spirit in the course of his quest for the luminous peaks of truth and justice. At a certain point, however, the inventory of enemies available to socialist realist artists simply ran out. With nothing better to feed upon, they turned inwards to examine the human soul, or in the very least focused their attention on the struggle against natural forces (”Virgin Soil Upturned” by Sholokhov, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature).

Vera Mukhina, The Worker and the Kolkhoz Woman, Stalinist period

Only a talented artist could possibly create socialist realist heroes without entirely sacrificing the human depth of the figures on the altar of moral preaching. Such a feat required an elusive magic formula, just like creation itself.

The hero is thus an exemplary new socialist man, an endlessly recurring archetype: “The communist aesthetic ideal is given expression in socialist realist art by means of a new type of positive hero – a laborer struggling to forge a communist society” (Philosophical Dictionary). We thus arrive at socialist realism’s most original contribution to humankind, which amounts to a revolutionary innovation in the art of drama: the conflict between the good and the better. Free or semi-free artists who sought to endow their art with meaningful depth stayed away from the Manichean contrast between “good” and “bad” by endowing all those involved in the dramatic conflict with various negative characteristics typical of humans. The socialist realists, by contrast, endowed their heroes with positive and super-positive characteristics that overshadowed negative or dubious personality traits.

This is the point at which talent enters into the game: only a talented artist could possibly create socialist realist heroes without entirely sacrificing the human depth of the figures on the altar of moral preaching.  Such a feat required an elusive magic formula, just like creation itself. It is for this reason that there exist so few socialist realist works of the second type, which have remained with us over the decades.

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“Socialist realism is based on the following principle: if transforming reality becomes impossible, then it is the perception of reality that must be transformed. ” The Cossacks of Kuban” amounts to changing the perception of the failing kolkhoz.” Yurii Borev, The Twentieth Century in Tales and Jokes, Kharkov, 1996

The Cossacks of Kuban, film poster, 1949

In 1949, the Soviet filmmaker Ivan Pyriev filmed “The Cossacks of Kuban.” This movie, one of the first color films in the Soviet Union, was released one year later, and immediately gained incredible popularity. In 1968, it was restored using new technological means, and was also reedited for the period following the demise of the cult of personality: the portraits of Stalin in the background of every scene were removed or retouched, and several scenes that were no longer politically appropriate were cut. To this day, traces of the editing process are clearly visible in the middle of several scenes in Pyriev’s film, which is repeatedly screened even in our post-Soviet era.

The period during which “The Cossacks of Kuban” was created was one of both optimism and distress. Four year after the end of World War II, the Soviet economy still lay in shambles (with the exception of the heavy industry, of course). Alternating draughts and heavy winter frosts put entire kolkhozes and cities in danger of real hunger. From a cultural perspective, this was the “Iron Age” of Russian art, whose repression by means of socialist realism was vigorously renewed for fear that civil allegiance would be undermined by the purifying victory over fascism and the Red Army’s presence in Europe. Under these circumstances, the masses were in need of an entertaining vision that would replace their bread of affliction with a hope that happiness was already on the horizon. “The Cossacks of Kuban” was the perfect answer to this human (rather than ideological) need, and it is thus a true masterpiece: characterized by innocent honesty, it is perhaps the quintessential example of an excellent artwork forged out of socialist realist materials.

Pyriev’s film belongs to the genre known as lyric or romantic comedy, even though it could also be defined as a musical comedy – thanks to the wonderful songs written for it by one of the most important socialist realist poets, Mikhail Isakovskii. Its narrative revolves around two parallel love stories – one between two workers in two competing kolkhozes, the other between the chairmen of those two same kolkhozes. When the happy farmers and workers gather at the annual agricultural fair, which is overflowing with produce (the film was shot on the richest kolkhoz in southern Russia, and the Soviet Ministry of Culture also made a generous contribution), these love interests resurge and threaten to undermine the healthy socialist relations between the two kolkhozes. Several dramatic conflicts unfold simultaneously: between the kolkhozes themselves, between the lovers, and between the two love stories: the young Dasha, who is in love with Nikolai from the neighboring kolkhoz, is the best worker on her own kolkhoz. Its chairman, Gordei Voron, is unwilling to give her up for the sake of the competing kolkhoz and of his secret love object, Galina Ermolayevna Peresvetova. Only a tormented love confession made by the latter (after he has already despaired of her love) rights all wrongs. The movie ends with a convoy of cars driving through the abundant fields of Kuban. When the two newly married couples emerge from the vehicles, we understand that the two kolkhozes have united, to everyone’s great joy. And they lived happily ever after.

Yurii Lyubimov, who later founded the famous Theater on the Taganka. Years afterwards, he recounted that in the midst of filming “The Cossacks of Kuban,” he was approached by an old woman from one of the surrounding hunger stricken kolkhozes, who asked him what the film was about. When he told her, somewhat embarrassed, it was about her own life, the life of a kolkhoz, she scolded him for lying

There are no outright enemies here. Only once, in conversation with Nikolai, does Dasha speak of the hardships of war and trials of nature suffered by her and her comrades at the kolkhoz, earning the “hero of the socialist labor” medal. With glistening eyes, she tells him of her trip to Moscow, the city of lights. This, then, is the unique socialist realist conflict between the good and the better: the role of “the good” is fulfilled by Voron: he is a handsome Cossack in charge of a flourishing kolkhoz, and has plenty of decorations of his own. Yet he is easily angered and impatient (this is an age-old dramatic-psychological trick, which conceals a “heart of gold” under a tough appearance), and is oblivious of the emotions experienced by his rival-lover, Galina Ermolayevna. She, by contrast, is the height of perfection. In the words of one of the workers on her kolkhoz, “Oh, how good our chairwoman is! How good!” This love story, which remains unrealized until the very end of the film, creates a psychological drama that parallels the dramatic unfolding of the film itself, as its protagonists undergo a journey of self-discovery and education. Indeed, this is one of the great features of “The Cossacks of Kuban.”

From a visual perspective, this is a stunningly produced film. Colorful mass scenes are combined with lyrical and intimate ones, and the songs that accompany the film gained an independent life of their own, and even became part of folklore: “Just as you were / still you are / eagle of the steppes, carousing Cossack,” Galina Ermolayevna sings the film’s most famous song in her tremulous voice to her lover Voron as he gallops away on his horse. The plot is accelerated and somewhat complicated thanks to the action of several secondary figures, who devise various ruses in the style of Renaissance comedy in order to bring the lovers together. One of these characters was played by Yurii Lyubimov, who later founded the famous Theater on the Taganka. Years afterwards, he recounted that in the midst of filming “The Cossacks of Kuban,” he was approached by an old woman from one of the surrounding hunger stricken kolkhozes, who asked him what the film was about. When he told her, somewhat embarrassed, it was about her own life, the life of a kolkhoz, she scolded him for lying: so fantastic was the distance between life on a kolkhoz in the late 1940s and the colorful utopia of happiness in “The Cossacks of Kuban.”

Monument commemorating the 40th anniversary of the victory over Germany in World War II, Riga, 1985

Unlike socialist realist literature or cinema, which presume a certain degree of active interest on the part of the audience, socialist realist sculpture and architecture require a passive audience.

Any visitor to Riga who leaves the Latvian capital’s old city and crosses the Stone Bridge leading to Victory Boulevard on the opposite bank of the Daugava river, will come upon a unique sculptural vision rising on the horizon: the monument commemorating the 40^th anniversary of the victory over Germany in World War II. This sculpture, which was erected in 1985, is located at the center of Victory Park, and is a central visual milestone on this bank of the river, at the heart of the surrounding urban fabric.

Unlike socialist realist literature or cinema, which presume a certain degree of active interest on the part of the audience, socialist realist sculpture and architecture require a passive audience. As public acts of artistic coercion, they celebrate a limited range of emotions and values, and are usually nothing more than pompous and solemn constructions. Indeed, this form of public art is an additional tool of ideological oppression common under the regimes that promoted socialist realism, and its stone and metal represent the rigidity of a regime based on ideological tyranny.

The relationship of such art to the surrounding built environment is thus usually violent and even destructive. One such quintessential example is the string of high-rises built at the heart of Moscow towards the end of Stalin’s rule, and which led to the effacement of countless streets and small houses that contributed to the unique appearance of the old Moscow. The Stalinist zeal to transform the human environment extended even to the natural world: the creation of the largest water reservoir in the world, the Rybinsk reservoir, required submerging the ancient Russian city Mologa; similarly, the project of channeling water to the deserts of Uzbekistan destroyed the Aral Sea. This series of ecological and architectural disasters, which have yet to be overturned, are a lasting legacy of the Soviet regime. In this context, the victory monument in Riga, a city severely damaged by the socialist realist building project, is a positive surprise. For many years, the area in which Victory Park was created was an “unexploited” tract of land at the center of the city; local leaders were anxious to use its grassy soil to commemorate the socialist transformation of the capital of Soviet Latvia. The construction of a victory monument in this particular spot, moreover, had a certain historical logic: in February 1946, key Nazi functionaries in the Eastern Baltics were executed at this site. The establishment of this memorial required determining both the visual and aesthetic appearance of the sculpture itself, and its relation to the surrounding urban environment.

The memorial has few aesthetically pleasing qualities: two sculptural groups representing the imprisoned homeland and the liberating Red Army flank a cluster of marble columns, which form a pentagonal star (it was popularly nicknamed “the thermometer”). Before the project was approved by the various artistic and ideological committees, it was subject to the examination of the censor: the original model contained a female figure representing the motherland and holding an infant in her arms; the infant, however, was removed for fear of the image’s religious associations (which might have solicited some sympathy from the public). To this day, the motherland stands with empty hands.

The question of the sculpture’s relationship to its environment, by contrast, was optimally resolved. Since the monument is located at the center of the park, there was no need to destroy vast built-up areas in order to clear a space for it. Moreover, the surrounding area has remained devoted to leisure and recreational activities and to public gatherings (at present, it is used for pro-communist and pro-Russian demonstrations against the Latvian government; the memorial’s status as the last monument created in Latvia by the Soviet regime undoubtedly imbues this site with a unique political flavor). The tall columns visible from a distance form a successful perspectival arrangement, especially when seen from the direction of the Stone Bridge: the viewer descending from the bridge to Victory Boulevard perceives the monument straight ahead, centered between the two rows of houses lining the boulevard, as if crowning the perspectival thrust of this large traffic artery. Those walking down the boulevard towards the monument thus symbolically reenact the long journey undertaken by the Red Army en route to the hoped-for act of liberation.

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“Why are you laughing, reader? What is all this unbridled laughter about, I’m asking you? Do you know what it smells of? … You won’t reply?! Well then, we will have to solicit an answer by different measures!” From a parody on the socialist realist novel of the obscure writer Vsevolod Kochetov, “What Do You Want?”, by S. Smirnov

Riga's central train station, an example of socialist realist architecture

The Red Latvian Riflemen Museum at the entrance to the old city of Riga

Billedkunstner Meir Tati præsenterer 20×20 sekunder på Pecha Kucha CPH #009 i Stærekassen 3. dec 2008.

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Pecha Kucha: www.pechakucha.dk
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