Israeli society has been going through a process of deconstruction of its political, ethnic and core, social structures, during the last 30 years. This process is mainly a result of changes caused by waves of immigration from the former Soviet Union states and the continuation of the strugle for freedom of the Palestinian people. Together with this process comes a new perception of Zionist history led by the “New Historians” that started their research of the 1948 war at the end of the 80’s. Their research exposed the ethnic cleansing done by the Israeli army to the Palestinian population during the war, and managed to question the moral foundations of the Zionist movement.
As an immigration state, based on the concentration of people from different nations as a new Jewish collective, Israeli society needed a unifying narrative to survive. This narrative maintained the image of the lone, fragile young nation of people coming back to their homeland. It also required an outside enemy in order to clearly define the borders of this new collective. So Zionist narrative became the most powerfull tool of control by the state. It is entwined through all stages of life of the Israeli citizen, from kindergarden till adulthood.
Because of the powerful role of narrative in the construction of Israeli identity and sense of collectiveness, and as part of the process of deconstruction of the last three decades, the field of narrative and history becomes central for artists wishing to create new cultural paradigms that are able to cope with the challenges of life in the Arab-Muslim Middle East not as a European enclave. The projects and videos that will be presented in this talk are all questioning the validity of the Zionist narrative and, through a process of subjectivisation, offer new alternative personal narratives.
Artists and projects presented:
“Autobiography of a City”- Ayam Foundation
“Over Memory” - Sala-Manca Group
“From the Streets of Jerusalem to the Palaces of London” - Haim Ben Shitrit, video, 18 min
“I.D. Card” - Nurit Sharett, video, 6 min
“Golem” - Shahar Carmel, Adi Kaplan, Noam Kaplan, Itai Onik, Yonatan Vinitzki, video, 17 min
ארכיוני המרכז הוקמו בתמיכת קרן אוסטרובסקי וארטיס
