The installation Neighborhood by Israeli artist Eli Petel, discusses the relationship between an image and the reality it represents. The installation comprises a digitally manipulated color photograph from 2005 and a video piece created three years later, for the exhibition. The photograph and the video present a residential quarter built in 1954 in Ramat Gan’s Ramat Hashikma neighborhood to house Yemenite Jews, former inhabitants of the Salame, Kheiriya, and Saquiya transit camps. As part of the urban renewal project, a sign was hung on the building in 1977, presenting the redevelopment architectural plan intended for the neighborhood. It remained in place ever since as a testimony of the project’s resounding failure. The gap between the reality of neglect and the faded promise is further emphasized in view of the sign’s dilapidated state. In the photograph Petel uses the sign as a painters’ palette: he samples colors from it in Photoshop, adding trees and skies to the building. The video screened next to it presents the same frame of the neighborhood at present, reconstructing the still photograph without the artist’s digitally painted additions. In this work Petel alludes to several spaces: the territorial space of a residential area, the architectural counterpart of the housing block in Holon seen through the Gallery’s glass wall; the museum space as representative of the Western artistic narrative; the space in which the exhibition is presented, which strives to dissolve dichotomous cultural representations; and the space between photograph-reality-viewer. While following the timeline of a single site, the installation Neighborhood strives to highlight acts such as reproduction, renewal, reconstruction, empowerment, intervention, and resistance as concepts and forces at once identical and antithetical, arising from a preoccupation with the historical/political, as from the artistic act.
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