“ART AND ACTIVISM IN ISRAEL” talk at the Kunstverein in Hamburg
I’m back in Weimar after almost two months in Israel. It was a good visit but I’m happy to be back in Wimar and start the next semester.
On Thursday (12.04.07) I’m traveling to Hamburg to give a talk at the Kunstverein (Klosterwall 23, 20095 Hamburg www.kunstverein.de). The Talk is at 19:00 will be in English and in think it is for free.
The evening is titled: ART AND ACTIVISM IN ISRAEL
In my talk that I named, ‘The separation wall in Palestine. Artists love to hate it’, I will speak about different projects dealing with the separation wall in Palestine. I will raise try to raise many questions on how should artists, activist and artist who are activist relate to this significantly life altering project? I will look at how practices of art are used; on the one hand to reduce the damages of the Wall, or on the other hand attempts to raise awareness to its harms of and the political struggle against it? I will also explore if art could have any positive role in this political construction project? And why are so many artists attracted to do work on this Wall?
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.
Here is the text written by Eva Birkenstock of the Kunstverein:
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.
