Jerusalem's art scene: Looking ahead from Musrara

If, by any chance, you have become disillusioned with the art scene in this country, don’t despair. In truth, our artists, across a multitudinous spread of disciplines and styles, generally come up with the compelling goods. But art, like any cultural creative pursuit, must constantly break new ground. As many an old guard have discovered to their chagrin, some new kids on the block with new ideas are going to challenge the established order and shake things up, whether the powers that have hitherto been like it or not. 

I got a taste of the future earlier this week when I popped over to the Canada House community center in Musrara, where third-year students were feverishly preparing for their final exhibition. Judging by the items being tested, positioned, and assembled as the youngsters – all about to graduate from Musrara, The Naggar School of Art and Society – were getting ready for the grand opening, we are in good, eager, and talented hands.

The curtain rose on the exhibition this Wednesday (through July 27) with an eclectic array of works that run the technological, conceptual, and stylistic gamut from photography to futuristic AI-assisted arrangements, with plenty between.

Since its founding in 1987, the Musrara school has plied a steady course through the choppy waters of creativity, guiding its students toward envelope-pushing endeavors across numerous fields of art. It is not on its lonesome in that regard. This country, and Jerusalem in particular, is blessed with a fine crop of institutions of learning that provide quality education and guidance to budding Israeli artists. 

AYALA LANDOW is about to complete a five-year stint as head of the New-Media Art Department. As a veteran of the national art scene with a bio that, to date, has included exhibitions at the Israel Museum, the Bat Yam Museum, the C1 Berlin Gallery, the Neues Museum Weimar in Germany, and the Center of Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, she is well positioned to offer her students a helping hand as they aim to put their thoughts, ideas, training, and talent to good corporeal presentational use.

With undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Landow seemed to be a suitable person to ask about the benefits of enrolling at Musrara as opposed to the generally considered more prestigious academy now located at the downtown campus on Bezalel Street.

“It is very much a matter of scale and the type of students that go to each place,” she observes. I suggested, more than a little provocatively, that students who end up at Musrara might have previously tried their luck at Bezalel but were turned down. Landow was having none of that. “No,” she retorts emphatically. “They are people who, at the outset, were not interested in joining such a large, established system. I would go so far as to call it a capitalist system.” That wasn’t a put-down. “I enjoyed my time at Bezalel very much,” she adds. “Bezalel suited me. I knew about Musrara, but I was happy at Bezalel.”

There are pros and cons on both sides of the educational-institutional divide. “The ones that come to Musrara are those that need personal attention and flexibility. They need a lot of flexibility and nurturing,” which can lead the way to an expansive playing field, notes Landow.

Eclecticism seems to be the name of the Musrara game. “This is a small school with an abundance of facilities, which allows you to combine lots of different things,” she explains.

That wasn’t the case at Landow’s alma mater. “As a student in the Art Department at Bezalel, I couldn’t avail myself of, for example, the facilities in the Industrial Design Department or the Photography Department. There is nothing interdisciplinary there. Here, we offer the relevant courses they don’t have at Bezalel.”

Musrara, she says, takes a hands-on approach to the curriculum ethos. “In Bezalel, for example, you don’t study programming in the Art Department. You don’t study anything technical. There is no music there, and here, in Musrara, we have a music department that is unmatched anywhere in Israel. The students that graduate from the department bring a lot to the national new music and experimental scene.”

The exhibition

That is evident in the graduates’ exhibition, with full albums by three students currently being rolled out at Canada House, including an intriguing offering from New Music Department graduate Imri Regev. The 21-year-old is clearly not holding back, as one would hope to see from youngsters who, for the time being, have had the benefit of working within the safe, cloistered confines of a school without having to deal with the logistics and existential demands of the dog-eat-dog marketplace. “The principal sonorous material that comprises this project comes from recordings of digital feedback systems using Max/MSP software, which was edited and mixed for a quadraphonic listening environment,” Regev says.

He continues in a more human, non-hi-tech vein: “I think I am a very romantic person. I don’t think I am an artist more than I am a person looking for the actual moments of life, with a difficult, heavy, and deep sense of romance. My emotions erupt from inside me when I move around the world as a subject.”

That sounds like an alluring standpoint on life from a 21-year-old who, naturally, is au fait with contemporary advanced technological amenities while keeping his feet firmly on the ground and his heart open.

I FOUND a young man after my own traditional analog heart in Zohar Attias, a student in the New Media Department. When I met the third-year student, he was busy checking cable connections and the working order of the screens and other technological paraphernalia in his exhibition space. The 20-something artist-in-the-making surprised – and encouraged – me with his take on the way the increasingly virtual, non-human world is evolving. “My whole work feeds off my attitude to technology and how it is taking over the way I make decisions,” he declares. In complete contrast to my line of shying away, as much as I possibly can, from the ever-encroaching clutches of gadgets and means of communication that circumnavigate, nay replace, human beings, Attias prefers a more proactive, braver approach. “I immerse myself in the technology because I am afraid of it. It is a sort of ‘know your enemy’ thing,” he laughs, adding that he has an advantage over me in that respect. “I use art to confront technology.” 

“Confront” sounds more than a little feisty. My own take runs more along the lines of endeavoring to cope rather than getting down and dirty.

Attias admits to a degree of contrariness: “I love technology, and I have become dependent on it, but I am scared that it is taking control of my life.” Hence, the clunky-looking old school equipment deployed around his display berth. “I use older technologies. Look at this,” he chuckles, pointing to a diminutive, box-shaped screen that looks like a prop from a 1980s hospital TV series. There is an almost tangible human element to Attias’s diploma/graduation project. “Look, I talk, and the system reacts, and there are cameras [which pick up anyone who moves into the area of the system]. It is live. The idea is to include the spectator in the experience of what is going on here.” That sounds delightfully untechnological and fundamentally human.

From the heights of my senior citizen vintage, I wonder whether more members of Attias’s generation have been following the low-tech analog line of thought and looking to return to a less virtual, more tactile, and natural world. “I don’t want technology to take over,” he states. “It is nice and comfortable to have all these devices that save time and effort, but I want to have more control over my own life and not surrender it to hi-tech wonders.”

Naturally, not all 20-somethings and certainly not all Musrara students share Attias’s more nature-oriented philosophy. Erez Cohen, for example, is fascinated by the possibilities facilitated by the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create humanless systems and take advantage of the seemingly endless amenities that can be gleaned from them. His graduation project, which goes by the nifty moniker of A(N)I – a play on ani, the Hebrew word for “I” – utilizes that to the max.

That becomes patently clear as I enter his room and see a large plasma screen placed on a seat to the left, opposite a large, book-shaped object. There is a giant-sized screen on the far wall with something that looks similar to Cohen’s face, in 3D, made up of thousands of tiny dots.

“In principle, my work addresses a duplicate of myself through the use of AI,” he explains. My technophobic brain immediately conjured up the “megalomaniacal” epithet. Cohen smiles at my half-joking aside and sheds more light on his plan of creative action. “I took my personal diary, which I write every evening, and gave it to AI. I taught it about the subjects I record in the diary. That resulted in a sort of duplication of myself, which came up with suggestions of more pages of writing in my diary.”

Notwithstanding my aversion to the domain of alternative, essentially artificial living, I was intrigued by the idea of a human-made device feeding off Cohen’s thought patterns and writing style and running with it in some previously untried direction.

“The project presents how AI deals with personal experiences, feelings, and thoughts, emphasizing the complexity of human-machine interaction,” he notes. He could say that again. The interface or, possibly, the overlap of human beings and digital apparatus is a whole world unto itself, although, hopefully, we will never reach a point of no return whereby we lose control over the “golem” we have created.

Cohen is happy to go with the flow and excited to see what AI has to offer, including reflecting and shedding light on aspects of his own emotional and cerebral makeup. Despite the cutting-edge technology at work here, Cohen did not always end up with an accurate extension of himself. “Sometimes it writes emotions I experience and writes like me. Sometimes it writes entries that I feel I could have written, and other times it goes into all sorts of new areas that aren’t really me.”

The generative video work also incorporates a virtual “psychologist” that analyzes the diary entries and passes judgment on Cohen’s, or his AI colleague’s, emotional state. It should be interesting to see how visitors react to this advanced technological intervention in the human ebb and flow. “The work examines the sense of exposure and privacy, inviting the audience to rethink their views on how technology affects our sense of self and on our relationship with advanced technologies,” Cohen adds. Food for thought, indeed.

THE GRADUATION EXHIBITION casts a net over a wide range of issues and elements of the students’ lives. That naturally references diverse political, societal, cultural, ethnic, religious, and sexual orientation topics.

Ghazal Rabous is clearly made of sterner stuff and strikes out boldly to highlight some sides of the traditional Muslim way of life that are not at all to her liking. Her still photography and video work, suggestively titled “The Horsewoman Guard,” takes a look at accepted wisdom in Muslim society but also jabs an accusatory finger at Western society and some of its questionable etiquette and values.

Rabous grew up on the family farm, and, as such, she and the other female members of the family engaged in horseback riding and became adept at the activity that is often considered an exclusively male domain. “In my work, I take photographs of myself, my sisters, and my friends – a group of women riding mares – in a single shot,” she expounds. “We are lined up, looking directly into the camera, into reality in a sense, expressing our confidence as independent women. Horseback riding and being outdoors provide a sense of freedom and release.”

Her exhibit also includes a video work in which we see a young Arab woman attempting to mount a horse into a side-saddle position. I recalled having seen pictures of Elizabeth II riding side-saddle. “I oppose the Western view, which has influenced Arab society, that riding a horse is detrimental to a woman’s image and might cause her to lose her virginity,” Rabous adds. “We are stronger and more beautiful when we become one with the mares and with nature.” Her exhibits also feature an alluring close-up of a horse’s flank, which conveys a highly tactile sense of the animal Rabous loves. “Yes, it is beautiful, isn’t it?” she remarks upon catching my appreciative gaze.

Not all the exhibitors are taking their first steps in the big, wide world. The doyen of the graduating bunch is septuagenarian, Polish-born Alter Liberman, whose “Relocation” photography and video installation asks questions about displacement, belonging, and immigration. Meanwhile, Ilana Hoffman, an Orthodox widowed mother of 15, says, “I use art to own my identity.” Through her “Calculations” still photography-video collection, she confronts matters of identity and her place in society. “As I try to balance my work with my status within my community and my sense of obligation to the family, I question relationships, love, tolerance, and social boundaries. At the center of that journey, I point the lens at myself as I continue to create new dialogues with love and loss.” That sense of beauty and fragility duly comes across unmistakably in her delicately crafted images.

Clearly, the spirit continues to thrive and produce inspirational, beautiful goods while we continue to grieve.■

For more information: graduation.musrara.co.il/2024/en/home/