The Museum on the Seam: "Beyond Memory"

There's a really cool yet under-appreciated museum in Jerusalem called The Museum on the Seam. Here's a description from the website:

The Museum on the Seam is a socio-political contemporary art museum located in Jerusalem. The Museum in its unique way, presents art as a language with no boundaries in order to raise controversial social issues for public discussion. At the center of the changing exhibitions in the Museum stand the national, ethnic and economic seam lines in their local and universal contexts.

The moment I read about it, I had to visit. To get there, you just take the light rail to the Shivtei Yisrael stop and cross the street.

The building itself has an interesting history (from the website):

The Museum is situated in a building that was built in 1932 by the Barmki family. Following the war of 1948 until the six days war of 1967, the building served as an army outpost on the border between Israel and Jordan alongside the Mandelbaum Gate that connected the divided city.

You can still see the snipers' apertures and exposed concrete walls throughout the museum. I looked out one of the apertures and saw a mom and daughter together by some swings... a disconcerting juxtaposition, but a relief that the aperture now just serves as a window.

The current exhibit is called "Beyond Memory," which begins on the first floor, takes you to the basement, then up to the roof-top observatory. The moment you enter the museum, you hear a digitized guitar string being plucked every fifteen seconds or so, with the sound reverberating across the gallery space. If you listen carefully, you can also hear metal and glass rustling together and what sounds like human breaths heard through a PVC pipe. Both are from video art.

Here are some highlights:

Moshe Gershuni
Israel
Kaddish: series of 8 panels entitled Blessed/Praised/Glorified/Exalted/Extolled/Honored/Magnified/Lauded
Aquatint, soft-ground, electric pencil
77x81cm
1984

I'm posting "Glorified" because the terrifying kabuki-mask-like face near the center, the dove up top, and the general movement upwards left me lingering in front of it for a while:

Lida Abdul
Afghanistan
In Transit
Film, 4.55min
2008

A description from the brochure: "[This film] features school children filling a military airplane's voids with cotton, attaching ropes, and attempting to fly the airplane like a kite. [...] without children playing and running through the streets of Kabul, Afghanistan today would be even more violent than it is."

(Blogger won't let me upload this clip-- sorry! I can show it to you in person.)

Ran Slavin
Israel
Ursulimum
Film, 18.30min
2011

Perhaps particularly because Seth's been getting me to read more science fiction lately, I was really into this film. I usually don't sit for the entirety of films at museums, but I watched this entire thing. The premise is that it is 2099, and a young boy discovers a "Third Temple of Jerusalem" underneath the Temple Mount and Well of Souls. The film begins with a narrative description of Jerusalem as a city that was "destroyed twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times."

There was just a single black, wooden bench in the center of a dark screening room that's curtained off in a corner of the basement gallery. The film is paced very slowly, to match the floating way in which astronauts walk around in zero-gravity (the young boy is in an astronaut suit). The screen fades in and out of various kaleidoscopic scenes from underground. Since it takes so long to upload videos, I'm only posting one to give you a sense of what I'm talking about:

Shilpa Gupta
India
Memory-II
wood, concrete
180x220x20cm
2008

From the brochure: "The work is placed on the observation point on top of the roof, thus emphasizing its visibility and its political-geographic message on the border line connecting East and West Jerusalem. A quick glance from the work towards the eastern hills of Jerusalem reveals segments of the concrete wall constructed in recent years as a renewed border line between Israel and the West Bank."

The view below (of some folks waiting for the light rail; for those who don't know, the gentlemen in full black suits and hats are ultra-orthodox):

The view of East Jerusalem from the observatory:

I did a quick sketch of the view from my rooftop cafe seat (including the pock-marked Jerusalem stone wall and metal rail) as I waited for my coffee and Argentinian cake. You may be able to make out the caterpillar-like light rail on its way in the upper left. The coffee was quite acidic and the cake was way too sweet, but being able to hang out for a while in the rooftop space with some of their art books was worth it: