In a country which has not yet been, and perhaps never will be, freed from the policies of emergency, military zones are fluid and can be created within minutes; whomever demonstrates or operates on the margins knows that military zones are created with the same swiftness in which emergency laws are constituted. The way in which the I.D.F. prevents demonstrations or civil disobedience is by declaring a civilian area a closed military zone. A closed military zone can be any place within Israeli occupied territory to which the army wants to deny access to civilians. Thus groups of activists are arrested on their way to demonstrations or dialogues with Palestinians. Demonstrations are diffused prematurely, nipped in the bud, due to the army or the boarder police’s use of anti-demonstration tactics. A new generation of artists has ensued that fights for social justice and believes art is not simply a mirror for society but that it can elicit social change. Such artists or artist collectives operate beyond the field of representation, in a more radical space where law is suspended and where art can operate between the metaphorical (or allegorical) and the concrete and thus disrupt the state of emergency’s enforcement. During his lecture in the Kunstverein Ronen Eidelmann (Artist and Activist) introduces his study ‚The separation wall in Palestine. Artists love to hate it’. By means of presenting different artistic projects in Israel, which deal with the separation wall in Palestine, various strategies as well as the limits of artistic resistance to the occupation will be discussed. Afterwards the free radio group Ligna and Simon Wachsmuth (artist) will present art works which they realized for Liminal Spaces, an exhibition-project in Leipzig, Ramallah and Holon.
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