In Hanna Farah-Kufer Birim and Dina Shoham’s work Block, 2002, the two artists – dressed in white t-shirts and red work overalls – stand in front of a pile of gray bricks. They face each other in silence, and immediately begin to work. Picking up one brick after the other, they each build a kind of fence or square wall around themselves. The two walls grow taller and taller, finally rising above their heads. These fortified structures seem to become two buildings, which in turn are transformed into two erect tombs that imprison the artists within them. The voiceover accompanying the work features the two artists engaged in a relaxed social discussion about the existential Jewish/Arab and Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Despite the conversation’s relaxed tone, the two separating walls rise further and further up, so that the artists seem to be burying themselves alive. One of the questions that arises in the course of their conversation is why the houses in refugee camps are not plastered. Is this, they wonder, the result of existential exigencies, or perhaps a subversive aesthetic stance? Interestingly, it is precisely this poignant question that brings our awareness to the fact that the two artists are laying the bricks one upon the other with great precision, yet are using no mortar to bind them together. This fact implies that, not unlike walls built in the course of a children’s game, these walls may eventually be dismantled and give way to other, joint construction projects.
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