We are born into a certain reality. A certain geography, history, climate, culture, conventions, class, traditions, values and principles. A reality that influences the way we live and act, which fixates the way we see things and think about them. A subjective reality. A collection of twenty messages, narratives that have been embedded within our collective memory, express a local paradox. Their mere existence will not allow a solution to the conflict within which the state of Israel exists in the middle eastern landscape, yet does not function as part of it.
This project follows a research executed by Oded Ben-Yehuda as part of his Master’s degree in London, where he disassembled and analyzed the term “Middle East”.
Ben-Yehuda wishes to review the option of changing the said reality, by removing the stigmas, cliches and fixated way of thought. By eliminating the borders of Israel and uniting it with its neighbours, a new state is formed: ״The Middle Middle East״. This new state aims to redefining a reality in which foes become neighbours, and neighbours become countrymen.
The exhibition consists of three parts that reflect the past, the present, and the future:
12 Middle Easts
This animation video presents 12 different maps that describe the evolution and territorial changes of the Middle East as defined throughout history. This action seeks to question states’ existence, in order to understand that a land or territory can be changed and is not sacred. This piece is the starting point of the exhibition, as an axioms breaking tool - one of the exhibition main goals.
The Paradox of the Middle East
20 massages that were developed since the foundation of Israel, translated into Arabic and English, surround the gallery space in 360 degrees. These sentences had became into local narratives that reflect the overall present messages saturating the current reality in Israel, in which we live today. Ben-Yehuda places another layer on these printed words, depicting the eyes of the leaders that developed and used these messages. Their eyes peek through narrow openings to us, or we look at them, as they deviate their gaze to left or right, avoiding direct confrontation.
This collection of narratives is an "indictment”, that politically and ideologically determine the reality in Israel, preventing the state from merging into the rest of the Middle East.
The Middle Middle East
In the gallery space is a conceptual proposal, a futuristic fantasy that cancels the borders of Israel and unites it with its neighbours to a new unified territory; The Middle Middle East. Like nature, which does not distinguish between borders and countries, a carpet of cactuses was chosen to sketch the new territory of the new state. The cactus, an exiled plant that came to the Mediterranean area from South America and was acquired both in Israeli culture and in the local Arab culture, expresses the union and equality within the new Middle East society.
We are born into a certain reality, identity, faith,
a starting point which is out of our control.
Is this true?
