Art Gallery

Photo: Amaya Galili

About the Gallery

Zochrot has been acting for some years now in the attempt to examine the space that is familiar to us, the Israeli space into which we were raised, and to discover it anew as a space that also tells the story of the Palestinian Nakba: The stories of the hundreds of refugees, destroyed villages and cleansed cities. The aim of Zochrot is to bring the Nakba to the awareness of Israeli Jews, to speak the Nakba in Hebrew and in so doing to change the Hebrew language. That is, to make it into a language that contains the Nakba (in Arabic), into a language that contains a fissure.

Over the past year we started to feel the need not only to speak the Nakba, but also to create a setting. We sought a space to think about the Palestinian Nakba not only as a historical event, as the tragedy of the Palestinians, but also as an ongoing event that constitutes the relationships between Jews and Palestinians who live here now. The Nakba, in many respects, is both the destruction of the culture that existed here until 1948 as well as the oppression of that which sought to continue to exist here afterwards. Thus, it seems to us that action in the field of culture, of artwork, is also opposition.

The gallery at Zochrot and the journal Sedek [“Fissure”], which is edited by Tomer Gardi and which was produced together with the Parrhesia group, offers a stage for work and thought around the Nakba. This is a stage to which creators and viewers are invited to try out other possibilities of relationships between the Nakba, the memories of 1948 and the different identities that have been assembled and disassembled in its wake. This is an invitation to think anew about 1948 as a moment during which different possibilities existed at the same time, to follow their tracks and perhaps to learn something about different possibilities today.

The gallery and journal are outcomes of a cultural movement that is taking place alongside and despite the difficult political events of recent times, and embody a stage for dialogue between the word and the visual image. They are an attempt to create a text that examines its borders: The borders of content, of language, and of the discipline.

The gallery and the journal seek to give expression to work that was produced on and as a consequence of the Nakba and to open a critical, civic discussion, personal and political, that situates the place and the relationships that were weaved round it as the object of its study.

Norma Musih


Location

Zochrot
61 Ibn Gvirol St.
(corner of 13 Maneh St.), Tel Aviv
Tel. 03-695-3155