In the year 2007, the Kunstverein in Hamburg presented six different ”Inserts” in addition to its regular shows of contemporary art, which operated as independent units parallel to the exhibition program. They were developed in a process of cooperation with varying formats all focusing on artistic as well as sociopolitical questions. From the 24th of March to the 6th of May 2007, the Israeli Center for Digital Art was presented in Hamburg as the second Insert of the series. A first room – beside the documentation of past projects – presented the Video Archive of the Israeli Center for Digital Art as an open video library. The presentation at the Kunstverein was the first stop of the Mobile Archive, which afterwards travels on to other art institutions in various countries of the world. A second room showed the center’s exhibition, ”Forbidden Games,” which explores the alternative world of video games in the Middle East which featured more than 22 video games written and distributed independent of the entertainment industry by activist media, academies and ideological groups and companies as a tool for addressing political and social issues. The Mobile Archive  takes the Israeli Center for Digital Art’s Video Archive on the road. In order to make the Archive dynamic and valuable to local audiences abroad, original project curators, Eyal Danon and Galit Eilat (The Israeli Center for Digital Art), and Eva Birkenstock (Kunstverein, Hamburg) decided to open the Archive to local art contributions to be collected by each host institute. The Mobile Archive is slated to travel for three years internationally, before it returns to Holon. The project consists of three parts: 1. Opening of the entire archive to the public at large: each visitor will be given the opportunity to selected materials s/he wishes to view. The archive will be presented in a video library format, where each visitor will be able to choose freely from hundreds of existing video works, and view the selected pieces under gallery viewing conditions. 2. Presentation of video programs curated by the Israeli Center for Digital Art, and by curators, artists, art students, and others. Some of the programs have already been presented several times; others will make their debut here. 3. Contributions of up to 25 selected works will be added to the original Archive by each host organization which represent artists from that region.

We are all Army

Art & Activism in Israel

Talk, Artist Presentation, Discussion with LIGNA, Simon Wachsmuth and Ronen Eidelman
12.4.07

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.