There’s a solo exhibition on in Jerusalem, reflecting on, and challenging the collection of the L.A. Mayer Museum for Islamic art there.
Sadly I can find out very few details about it – but I wanted to share two films with you.
The first one has the venerable Professor Ettinghausen and two other art historians, trapped in a 1950s television quiz, itself emprisoned in a 17th century Mughal box. They use all the standard art historical methodologies, but completely fail to recognise even the continent of the object they are set to identify. The ‘academy’ is itself is depicted as an archaeological anomaly – and free of any practical function.
Then there is an animated film, of an athlete-dancer rope-dancing suspended over a ‘belly boat’.
Haaretz newspaper has written up the exhibition in more detail – here. According to them:
“[The artist] Yitzhak … openly challenges Islamic art’s scholars, collectors, film directors and screenwriters … as she takes on the discourse of the experts and interpreters who seek to rescue the concept of a museum from oblivion.
… [she] returns to the public the items that have been changed, displaying them together with their Western appendices; however, [now] the items are different and have a renewed visual wholeness. This is an exhibition in which intense beauty is projected from every wall and onto the viewer like a planetarium that is also a time tunnel and a crystal ball. Yitzhak shows the tense relationship between the “finding” and the “scholar,” between culture and folklore, between the mysterious object and the way it is perceived. She is concerned not only with offering a political exposure of the invention of the Levant; she also wants to reestablish the Orient as an entity with a dramatic, hypnotic aesthetic. At the same time, she presents the Eurocentric approach of the experts as nostalgic material, as yet another story.”
It all sounds fascinating. It’s sad that it’s so locked inside a Museum in Jerusalem, that only a very few people will get access to.
I wonder how much the artist is creating a consumer object, within the (undoubtedly commercial) art market, and how much she is really interested in ‘returning’ the items to the public?