With a rich display of over 200 artifacts, the Metropolitan Museum exhibition “Jerusalem, 1000-1400,” subtitled “Every People Under Heaven,” intended to introduce the viewers to a peaceful, spiritual, culturally and religiously diverse place, which they imagine the city of Jerusalem to be. Rula Khoury visited the exhibition and came back with some thought-provoking questions.
The third and final part of the essay by Noah Simblist focuses on Akram Zaatari’s use of dialogical exchange as an artistic strategy. While completely different in their dynamics and outcomes, Zaatari’s conversations with both Hagai Tamir and Avi Mograbi, he argues, reveal different degrees of both personal and political engagement and, at the same time, various forms of antagonism and refusal.
Many emotionally and politically charged places appear in Nir Evron's work, among them Rawabi, the new Palestinian city, the Seven Arches Hotel on Mount Olive, in Jerusalem, and the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, USA. What happens to the concreteness of the locations and the specific political stories when the works separate content and form? Hagai Ulrich reviews Evron's show, "Masad (Foundation)."
Following Karen Russo’s recent video work “Haus Atlantis,” which blends the genres of documentary, historical essay, and science fiction, the artist readdresses her work’s visual and textual elements in the form of a visual essay.
Built in 1931, Haus Atlantis in Bremen is a combination of patron Ludwig Roselius’ vision to restore the German racial identity by resuming the glory of ancient times, and Bernhard Hoetger’s expressionist, symbolist, and monumental architecture.
Writing about Josh T. Franco’s work “In Tlilli, In Tlapalli: Three Tejanos in Red and Black,” Rotem Rozental follows the migration and reincarnation of individuals, colors, ideas, and legacies between New York City and Marfa, TX.
In the second part of his essay analysing Akram Zaatari’s 2013 work “Letter to a Refusing Pilot,” Noah Simblist addresses a previous work by the artist that involved a conversation with filmmaker Avi Mograbi. Simblist is reading this work through the prism of dialogical exchange, referencing Grant Kester’s definition of “dialogical art,” as well as Ella Shohat’s observations on the identity politics of Mizrachi or Arab Jews.
In the summer of 1982, during Israel’s incursion into Southern Lebanon, a story swirled around the port town of Saida that acquired mythological flourishes: One of the Israeli fighter jets that were sent to the nearby Palestinian refugee camp of Ain El-Helweh, aborted its mission to bomb a school building, its pilot dropping the bombs into the sea instead. In a text for Tohu Magazine, that will be published in 3 parts, Noah Simblist dives into Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari’s work, Letter to a Refusing Pilot, instigated by this true story.
Writing a review of a recent publication on Afrofuturism for Tohu Magazine has led Lama Suleiman to explore the still-nascent concept of Arabfuturism and its potential relevance to the discourse on Arab and Palestinian cultural production.
In Eyal Weizman’s new book, the reader joins the author as he hovers over contested territories in the Middle East, follows him as he traces the histories, ideologies, slippery borders, technologies, and narratives involved in the State-inflicted marginalization and displacement of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert, in Southern Israel. Rotem Rozental reviews “The Conflict Shoreline,” as well as Weizman’s methodology of forensic visual culture research.
The Dome of the Rock – that golden, volatile rock of contention – is at the center of an exhibition at the Bezalel Photography Gallery. Noa Hazan writes for Tohu about the exhibition and about the visual research that has preceded it, which involved studying hundreds of photographs of the site from the last 150 years, and suggested new terms for looking at its visual representations.
