In the installation at the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (DCCA), I presented Grafted Land  together with The Wounded Land Trilogy (2010-2015).

Like all maps which, whilst following certain objective codes, create a subjective reality following overt or covert political agendas, Grafted Land deconstruct cartographic power.

The map, spread on an “operation table” with white and red bandages, spools of green thread and green haemostats, relates to a Palestinian Tourist Map of the Holy Land in which the territories of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights and Israel are coloured differently. The Green Line (Armistice Line of 1949) and the controversial Separation Wall erected during the Second Intifada figure on the map.

The disputed regions in the Grafted Map, which have undergone a “surgical” procedure, are sliced away from the territory representing Israel on official Israeli maps. The 4 red disembodied and excised parts, of unknown viability, are covered with sterilised gauzes and sutured with a green thread delineating new borders.

Behind the operation table are screened the Wounded Land Trilogy, 3 performances at the Dead Sea, The Hizma checkpoint and in Lifta. All Sisyphean and symbolic acts of healing visible and less visible wounds inscribed in the geography of the landscape and the body.

Sea of Death (2010), The Olive Tree (2012), The Spring (2015)

The new series of maps, entitled ‘Grafted Land’ relates to Palestinian Tourist Maps of the Holy Land. Produced by the Palestine Mapping Center[2], the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights on these maps have a different color then the Israeli areas and are demarcated by the Green Line (Armistice Line 1949) and by the Separation Wall erected at the onset of the Second Intifada.

In the series ‘Grafted Land’, disputed areas undergo a ‘surgical’ procedure to remove them from the map. The West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights on the new ‘operated’ map, have been excised from the territory representing Israel on official Israeli maps.[3] The current map, covered with sterilized gauzes[4] soaked in plaster, shows four severed segments sutured with green thread delineating the borders of those novel entities. The areas on the map of the excised parts are red and so are the used gauzes alongside the wounded map.

 ‘Grafted Land’ is reminiscent of ‘Surgical Operation’, a  performance on closure maps held in 2004 that took place in Jerusalem and of ‘Dressed Land’, a symbolic map installation of a wounded and bleeding ‘Mother Land’ exhibited at Rutgers University in 2012.[5]

 All maps, whilst following certain objective codes, actually create a subjective reality that follows overt or covert political agendas. The series ‘Grafted Land’ leave open the viability of such disembodied entities.

July 2015

The Heara (comments) multidisciplinary art events orchestrated by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman of the Sala-Manca art group  that took place in Jerusalem during the years 2002-2007, in the midst of the Second Intifada, and involved hundred of artists who exhibited site-specific works in significant sites throughout the city, were the most fascinating art events in which I took part. It was during these events that I did my first performances and that I collaborated with other artists to create works of art. Those events enhanced my perception that Jerusalem was the geographical place I would choose in order to express my art without having to run to Tel Aviv to present my portfolio to curators hesitant to drive beyond the Sha’ar Hagai’s junction. It increased my awareness that art should not dwell into Kantian Disinterestedness, but should instead be rooted into the political and the ethical of a ‘here and now’. It was at a time when, with almost daily suicide bombings and the building of the Wall around Jerusalem, the political conflict entered my art more directly consequently to my work as a free-lance news photographer. ‘Here it is not Switzerland’, with black graffiti in Hebrew written over a huge banderol showing Lindt chocolats snowy Alps’ peaks hanging on the facade of the Sergey Coutyard, created the link between my pastoral country of birth, art and the ‘here and now’ that did not allow me to make blind aesthetic choices detached from the actual context. The banderol was exhibited at the art happening ‘Migrashim Harousim’ (2003) together with two Jerusalem Scrolls showing the Separation Wall in Abu Dis. The event was organised by Lea and Diego in response to Art Focus, the international art biennial, taking place nearby at the Museum of Underground Prisoners.

The Heara events offered the artists the challenge of learning about and ‘reacting’ to the history of a building, bringing together past and present into a work of art, a possibility that could not actualise in the more respectable yet dull ‘White Cube’ museum space. During these events, I also discovered the power we had, we the artists, as a group of creative individuals thirsty to express ourselves without being dependant on the dominant institutions and without having to pursue a ‘courting ballet’ with its curators. In the midst of the Intifada, and afterwards, there was still a reason to create and exhibit in Jerusalem and to be proud of doing so. Lea and Diego created this space and we filled up that space with creative energies and works of art that resonated throughout the corridors and the rooms of those historical buildings. What else could we ask for?

It is  only now in retrospect, after the last Heara 12 at The Hansen House and while reading the documentation in *Heara, that I am able to realise the significance of what happened back then. It was much more then just another colourful art event, it was a real ‘Comment’, an ‘Heara’, about the institutional world of art, about center and periphery and about engaged multidisciplinary creation.

Jerusalem, September 15 2014

For more information on the Heara projects, see: www: no-org.net

Having previously created artworks with natural elements such as honey, earth, water, air, beehives and milk powder, I decided to use large amount of olives in 1998 for a project at the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art.

This sudden desire to use olives was triggered by a buried memory that reemerged from the depths of my subconscious. A memory linked to the first year of my arrival in Israel as a young student and to that of my first war trauma embodied in the First Lebanon War. In the summer of 1982, a student at the Rothberg International School of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with a minimal knowledge of Hebrew, the complexity of the conflict escaped me, but the war was a gruesome reality with soldiers of my age dying.

That summer I volunteered at the Kibbutz Beit Hashita where the rough physical work at the olive factory helped me forget the war. Motivated by this sudden recollection, I decided 17 years later to pay a visit to the olive factory. It had changed a lot, no more manual work under the burning. During my visit, I learned that the factory was exporting olives to the US in black plastic barrels. I decided to create an installation entitled ‘Correspondence’ with barrels filled up with thousands of olive pits lightened by a red dim light.

A year later during my pregnancy in 1999, I turned my gaze towards the enclosed space of the barrel, using this time my camera to grasp the essence of these red olive landscapes in the confined territory delimited by the barrel. And as all distinctions between inner/outer, micro/macro, origin/end, implosion/explosion, linear time/cosmic time, finite/infinite, collapsed, my gaze became a vehicle recording those images occurring in that confined territory delimited by the barrel. ‘Core’ was exhibited in a photo installation at the Noga Art Gallery in Tel Aviv in 2000, where I fragmented the space of the gallery with Plaster walls, inducing the viewer to stroll within the interconnected spaces.

In ‘Hidden Maps,’ tiny pictures of these olive landscapes were cut and inserted within the holes of plastics sheets, creating a link between different kinds of landscapes. This work linked together the olive landscapes and hidden roads of Jerusalem’s cartographic maps.

In the short video entitled ‘The Gaze’ created in 2002, the video shows on a double screen a motionless olive topographic landscapes suddenly coming alive thanks to the red bulb moving inside the barrel. Hovering above these olive landscapes, locked within a round circle, a single eye that becomes the manifestation of a disembodied monocular vision staring at the viewer.

In 2003 I created five ‘camera obscura’ using lids of black plastic olive barrels. At the time I was photographing the beginning of the construction around Jerusalem of the security wall. Viewers peeping through a hole inside the lids could see Palestinians villages behind barbed wires lightened in a dim red light. The lids of the olive barrels from the kibbutz of Beit Hashita, previously used in ‘Correspondence’ to view olive landscapes, now framed the sharp reality of the conflict brought about by the Second Intifada. Five years later, in December 2007, I replaced the pictures with those of a Palestinian family harvesting olive trees not far from the fence in a village called Deir El Gusun situated not far Tulkarm, in the West Bank. The combination of these pictures and the barrel lids from the Israeli Kibbutz was a way to merge within an artwork two separate worlds.

In 2004 and in 2006, I created installation works with blackened olive pits. Both the ‘Behind the Wall’ (2004) and ‘Still Life’ (2006) were undoubtedly the outcome to my photographic assignments as a freelance news photographer witnessing the violence of the second Intifada. In August 2006, a few days before the cease-fire of the Second Lebanon War, I strolled through a burned olive orchard, stopping in front of an olive tree ripped apart by a missile fired from Lebanon.

‘Behind the Wall’ is a personal metaphor for a landscape that had forever lost its innocence, leaving no place for romantic and picturesque feelings. It relates to a Holy Land that has become a Border Land, a land of geographic, military and cultural borders. For that purpose I created an installation behind temporary partition walls, relinquishing the main exhibition space using pits turned black, vestiges of yearly wars over olive harvests. In ‘Still Life’ (2006), the black olive barrels were now sliced up, pouring out black olive pits onto the floor. While ‘Correspondence’ gathered sensuous red olive landscapes within round barrels, now the olives black pits leaked out from black and red wounded bellies.

In July 2011 I carried a performance at the Hizma checkpoint located at the North-Eastern entrance of Jerusalem. There I bandaged a dead olive tree that had been uprooted and replanted to beautify the walled landscape but had not survived his dreary environment. The performance and the video ‘The Olive Tree‘ work I create was part of Sisyphean acts of ‘healing’ a wounded landscape.

In August 2009, following my daughter’s accident, the sterile bandages that had covered her body, were used to cover fragments of Closure Maps. Cutting, erasing, sewing and swathing the maps in bandages allowed me to deconstruct the hierarchy of cartographic power inscribed within the original maps. Sewing the green letter X signifying ‘Barrier Gates’ as a decorative stitch around the maps, I created each time and in various locations a singular meditative moment.

My first public performance of sewing the maps took place in Jerusalem during the art event ‘Manofim’ at the Yellow Submarine Gallery in September 2009. Sewing took place in galleries, at cartographic conferences and in the Old City of Jerusalem where the green thread weave the religious quarters of the city together, ‘healing’ an invisible wound.

Smoking Utopia #2 is a collaborative project undertaken together with my colleague Reuven Zahavi. It is part of an ongoing project started in 2006 called Night and Smoke,  a project triggered by  the violence near the Gaza border after the attack on June 25^th 2006 by  the Hamas at the Kerem Shalom crossing during which Cpl. Gilad Shalit was abducted and which was followed by  an IDF operation codename  ‘Operation Summer Rain.’

Underlining our work is a concern to infuse artistic autonomy to items utterly immersed in actuality, challenging the usual disinterestedness of aesthetic language regarding the ‘here and now’ through the use of  photography, 3D animation videos and manipulated interactive texts, while breaking up the customary visual and textual meaning of political events channeled through the medias.

Following the installation at the Jerusalem Workshop in 2007 where we exhibited virtual smoke as 3D animations and real smoke in the space, this time in our installation we divided the space in 3 different rooms. In the main room we had a large number of ladders scattered in the space to give a sculptural constructivist framework to our installation. In between the ladders at various heights, we installed old Tvs on shelves  showing various video works relating to events that took place around the Gaza border in the past two years. In another  room we exhibited photographies and prints on paper from 3D files and in another room we projected the Kissufim Labyrinth, a 3D animation work. The work was exhibited shortly before the military campaign codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’ launched by the IDF  against  Gaza in December 2008 in order to stop Hamas rockets attacks on southern Israel. This campaign which lasted a month and entailed much wreckage and death, especially in Gaza. Both Israel and Hamas announced a unilateral ceasefires, two days later Israel once more withdrew from Gaza.

In this violent huit-clot, the future  seemed blurred by the smoke coming out from maneuvering tanks, firing artillery and rockets while  the individual, like in the 3 D animation work of Kissufim Labyrinth, becomes a prisoner strolling through a labyrinth of concrete slabs.

The post Wounded Landscape first appeared on Ariane Littman.]]> https://ariane-littman.com/2007/10/smoking-utopia/ Mon, 01 Oct 2007 12:17:01 +0000 http://50.87.146.82/~arianere/?p=2642   The photographic journeys which I undertook on the Gaza border during ‘Operation Summer Rain’ in Summer 2006, led to the creation with my colleague Reuven Zahavi to a series ...

Video:  3’54 min (sound, animation and video by Reuven Zahavi)

This animation work was first exhibited as part of the site specific video installation at the Jerusalem Print Workshop during the multi-site interdisciplinary Art Event, Heara 11 – The Last Comment,which took place in October 2007. There the virtual smoke of ‘Just Smoke’ was enhanced by the actual smoke expelled by a smoke machine within the space.

The work relates to the military operation ‘Summer Rain’ (2006) that took place after the adduction by the Hamas of  corporal Gilad Shalit at the Kerem Shalom crossing on June 2006. Artillery fired at open areas in the southern Gaza Strip and bridges in central Gaza while infantry, engineering and armoured forces entered in the southern and northern Gaza Strip. Qassam missiles were fired in retaliation into Southern Israel. This state of war led to the creation of a series of multi media projects with my colleague Reuven Zahavi around the theme ‘Night and Smoke.’

The work relates to the military operation ‘Summer Rain’ (2006) that took place after the adduction by the Hamas of corporal Gilad Shalit at the Kerem Shalom crossing on June 2006. Smoke from artillery firing at open areas in the southern Gaza Strip and at bridges in central Gaza while infantry, engineering and armoured forces entered the southern and northern Gaza Strip. Smoke from Qassam missiles being fired in retaliation into Southern Israel. This smoke emerging from armoured forces, blurring the vision were perceived by us as a metaphor for the covering up and the concealing of reality. This lack of transparency permeating society at many levels became an existential reality which left the individual vulnerable and powerless and without a sense of perspective.