Following the launching of LIMINAL SPACES / grenzraume in March of this year, we are now looking back on eight months of work with the artists, which took place under increasingly difficultcircumstances. The project has endured the deterioration of the political situation in the Middle East – including the Israeli war on Lebanon, which has further radicalized communities and cultural producers alike. The Palestinian artists participating in the project, especially, have had to rethink their involvement in it.
During the course of this project, we have had to repeatedly reiterate and clarify its aim; we underscored the fact that it is not an attempt at normalisation, and that it is not meant to offer amodel for peaceful coexistence between two equal partners. Rather, we reasserted that the main aim of the project was to serve as a platform of resistance and vocal opposition to the ongoing Israeli occupation, and to its direct effectson the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank. This project operates in a context in which the distinctions between art and politics are blurred. We wish to examine the possible role of art as a catalyst for political and social change and to trigger a more active form of political engagement within the art world. We feel that the clear political stance of the participants and the curators is the basis for the network that Liminal Spaces / grenzraume presents.
The circumstances we have endured have meant that as curators, we have had to adjust ourselves to conditions in which it has become almost impossible to conduct simple joint meetings. Due to the constantly increacing level of closure imposed on the Territories, we have had to take a series of conceptual and logistical decisions – including shelving our ambition to establish a center for conference, meetings, lectures and production in Qalandia.
We are happy that despite all these added difficulties, the artists have been determined to continue working. We can thus now present a series of new works examining the condition of everyday space, borders, physical segregation and cultural territories within the reality of the occupation. These art works suggest the potential of art to serve as a tool for challenging existing systems and power structures within the radically divided and fragmented urban region of Jerusalem / Ramallah – a laboratory for an urbanism of radical ethnic segregation.
Following their individual residencies, European, Palestinian and Israeli artists embraced the opportunity to research tactics and artistic strategies for addressing the physiognomy of specific sites and their everyday operations, and for exposing the spatial and contextual politics of the Israeli occupation.
The future library spaces of the Gallery for Contemporary Arts Leipzig (GfZK), including the already acquired shelves of Vito Acconci’s library installation at Documenta X, provide an unusual exhibition context. They generate mutual resonances between LIMINAL SPACES as an evolving archive of research and production in the Middle East, and between the GfZK’s ambition to build up a public library.
We are currently facing a series of crucial questions:
How can this unique body of artistic research be made accessible? Will this work process be continued? What responsibility have we curators and artists taken on by engaging with this body of work?
The exhibition gives us the opportunity to meet each other again at a distance from the researched space, and to reflect on the evolution of the process so far. Meeting outside the region raises new questions regarding the perception of the Middle East and the image of Palestine and of Israel in Europe, and especially in Germany. These questions are directly related to the question of responsibility, and to the different resonances of this term in the Middle East and in Europe.
We would like to further explore the political and social responsibilities of artmaking and to discuss current trends that are changing the roles of institutions, artists, curators and activists. Specifically, we would like to focus on the notion of ”responsibility” in the context of the Middle East, which has witnessed the escalation of violence and of human and civil rights violations; the continuation of the Israeli military occupation; the building of an apartheid wall; and the complete breakdown of the peace process. We would also like to examine this notion in the context of post- Fordist Central Europe, where the erosion of social democratic principles is challenging artists and institutions to survive in a harsher social climate, and to fight for the acceptance and the engagement of a wider public. For us, this exhibition represents a single stage in a longer process; we have therefore decided to combine the exhibition with an international workshop. This workshop will allow all participants to reflect andto debate, creating an additional opportunity for both individual and group encounters as well as for external contributions and feedback.
Context:
The Israeli project of territorial and demographic control has been deeply inscribed in the physical and social fabric of the intersecting regions of Israel and Palestine. Urban frontier zones like Jerusalem have become laboratories for an urbanism of radical colonial expansion and ethnic segregation: a spatial matrix of ethnically homogeneous, insular realities, which are enclosed within a series of spatial and mental frontiers. Everyday contact zones between the ”Israeli” and the ”Palestinian” city, and between Palestinians on either side of the Wall, have been eroded to a bare minimum. Physical frontiers are reinforced by the generic architectural vocabulary of aggressive seclusion, which mirrors global trends of socioeconomic, ethnic and political segregation. Domestic and public spaces in the Israeli city have become increasingly militarized, as preventative measures are adopted against the omnipresent fear of real, constructed terror and internal threats.
Security and control mechanisms and an atmosphere of fear transform everyday urban spaces into frontier zones; suburbs into gated enclaves; and suburban shopping centers into fortresses. An equally strong impact is exercised by mass communication tools and media technologies that highlight extreme images, which condition the everyday perception of the other. For Palestinians, Jerusalem has become a closed and constnalty shrinking city that is open only to those who hold Israeli ID cards and who are able to afford living in the city’s increasingly congested neighborhoods. Israeli walls and setlements (illegal under international law), bypass routes and checkpoints have become synonymous with a reality in which terms such as ”closure” and ”curfew” are part of everyday life. In the context of increasing political and economic hardship, Palestinians are preoccupied with their everyday survival.
The site:
Road 60 is the historical traffic artery connecting Jerusalem and Ramallah and extending beyond them to both the north and the south. Its present condition could be considered prototypical of the alienation, segregation, and fragmentation that characterize the Israeli method of occupation.
Once a fluid and constnatly evolving spatial continum, this area has dissolved into a complex array of bufferzones; security orcontainment zones; border areas; walls or sites of involuntary proximity and collision such as checkpoints (both permanent and temporary). Before the erection of the Wall the road was a monument to the colonial relations between Israel and the Palestinian areas. From 1967 onwards, urban growth in Palestinian areas along this road was severely curtailed by a plethora of laws and zoning regulations. Today, the road has taken on a more horrific quality as a result of the checkpoint and the related regime of control and surveillance. Its central section, which is located within Jerusalem, was relocated and widened in the 1980s to follow the no man’s land that had divided the city between 1948 and 1967. What was planned as a ”boulevard for the united city” became, in reality, a wide buffer zone inthe shape of anurbanhighway, which led to further fragmentation of Jerusalem’s urban fabric by creating both an invisible wall and mental barrier. As the road advances north, it cuts through the suburban terrain of East Jerusalem where Israeli setlements face Palestinian enclaves and villages, passing by the refugee camp of Shu’fat.
Here, the road becomes a bypass road whose exits and entrances lead to the ethnically segregated satellites of Greater Jerusalem. Shortly before the Palestinian town of Ar-Ram, the new Wall bisects the road down the middle with the aim of cutting off Ar-Ram (to the East) from the areas that have been annexed to the municipality of Jerusalem and the industrial area to the west. A new border regime has been established, reducing points of crossing to official and increasingly sanitized checkpoints such as Qalandiya, one of the largest checkpoints in the West Bank. The checkpoint is characterized by a massive Palestinian public transport hub and by an informal market, as people arriving from the southern West Bank are forced to cross the checkpoint by foot before continuing their journey on a different bus into AlBireh and Ramallah. Frequent incursions
by the Israeli army have let the road in a state of ill-repair. The road passes several abandoned army checkpoints and the Qalandiya and Al Amari refugee camps before entering the dense urban centers of the twin cities of Ramallah and Al Bireh.
Curatorial Advisors:
Khalid Horani, Andreja Hribernik, Jack Persekian and Barbara Steiner, in cooperation with Interdisziplinares Projekt-Forum (Wolfgang Knapp) of the University of the Arts Berlin / Institute for Art and Contex
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
