Naama Arad’s ‘Har Hazofim’ quotes the view from the window of the fictional Frank Lloyd Wright creation from Alfred Hitchcock’s classic ‘North by Northwest.’ A peach-toned silken curtain intervenes between our gaze and the Xerox copies pasted to the opposite wall on which landscapes can be seen. The paternalistic presidential visages of Mount Rushmore and the modernist architecture both see their material and ideological texture inverted in the most tender of feminist veilings. The title of the work refers to the mountain of the same name, and Israeli enclave in East Jerusalem that houses the Bezalel Academy of Art founded in 1906.
A group of eight people set forth from Palestine to cross the Mediterranean and land in Camargue. These are the first Christians that settled in Europe: Mary Magdalene, Maria Salome, Maria Jacobé, Sara-la-Kali, Martha, Cedonius, Lazarus, and Maximinus. In ‘Mare Nostrum’ (eng. Our Sea) – named after the Italian Coast Guard’s operation to save shipwrecked refugees – Michael Meise focuses on a migration movement that has been largely forgotten, and models the sojourners as patron saints of a church in Kassel. Instead of instrumentalizing Christian values as alibis for EU boundary-making, she reminds us of a foundational migration movement of a diverse community. In this exhibition Martha and Cedonius are on view.