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Museum on the Seam
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 Museum is committed to examining the social reality within our regional conflict, to advancing dialogue in the face of discord and to encouraging social responsibility that is based on what we all have in common rather than what keeps us apart. The Museum is situated in a building constructed in 1932 by the Arab-Christian architect, Anton Baramki. The building was first captured by the Haganah forces in 1948 and used as a forward military position. Later, in 1967 it was once again on the front. Both in the past, as in the present, the building’s importance is based on geography. When the city was divided, the area in which the museum is located was known as the Mandelbaum Gate. The Mandelbaum Gate area was the sole location for Israel-Jordan Armistice Committee meetings, held between officers of the IDF and the Jordanian Legion officers, under the auspices of the United Nations. In fact, the United Nations building is just across the way from the museum. The Museum on the Seam was established in 1999 with the generous support of the von Holtzbrinck family of Germany, through the Jerusalem Foundation and by the initiative of the designer and curator of the Museum, Raphie Etgar. Between May 2005 and June 2008 the Museum presented a series of exhibitions on the theme of human rights. The series was opened with DEAD END that dealt with the threat that violence poses to our social fabric. The second exhibition in the series EQUAL AND LESS EQUAL opened in September 2006. It dealt with work/slavery and exposed the distressed existence of man in a world of globalization and migration. In the summer of 2007 BARE LIFE opened at the Museum, the third exhibition and last in the series dealing with human rights. The exhibition, which closed in June 2008, dealt with the disintegrating line between abnormal and normal situations. The exhibit pointed to the dangerous place where a temporary emergency situation can be turned into a legitimized status quo accepted by the silent majority, a situation that can in the end lead to a paranoia of suspicion and to the use of violence to re-establish public order. Exhibition HEARTQUAKE, which was dedicated to exploring anxiety in its local and universal contexts, was opened in July 2008. HeartQuake tried to expose and to accentuate people’s emotional confrontation with their surroundings, and through the prism of anxiety to examine their responses as injurers and as injured - with the aim of understanding and influencing the dynamics of social and political relations. The exhibition NATURE NATION closed in November 2009. The exhibition Nature Nation was based on diverse aspects of distinctions, positions, beliefs, ideologies, and social, political and economic points of departure that explore the complex encounter between man and the environment and between man and nature. The exhibition proposes a critical reading, which presumes that the encounter between them is a mirror for broader phenomena. This mirror reflects the crisis in the relations between man and nature, which finds expression in neglect, conquest and deterioration. The exhibition HOME LESS HOME opens January 15, 2010 and will aspire to investigate the relationship between the private home and the state. It will study the formal and functional similarity between the two spaces which enables the definition of both as "home", and the difference between them, which traditionally places the former in the private sphere and the latter in the political sphere. The home is seen as something "natural", as a space dominated by needs that are of no interest to the designed public space. Its interior is identified as a private, safe space, beyond the reach of legitimate intervention of the state. The contours of the home will be exposed as something that needs to be constantly redefined, since the political invades the home time and again, and the private home can be politicized at any given moment.
Contact Information: Museum on the Seam Website: www.mots.org.il Directions: Buses #30 & #6 Museum Hours: Sun, Mon, Wed, Thurs 10:00 am-5:00 pm Entry Fee: Adult, 25 NIS; Children, Students, Senior Citizens, 15 NIS. Source: Gems in Israel, Museum on the Seam Photo: Copyright © 2000 Gems in Israel All rights reserved. Reprinted with Permission. |
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