Exhibition

You May Not See it

As part of the triennial, this installation is a collaboration between Yoav Galai and Staging Difficult Pasts that interrogates the space of the city of Jerusalem by physically deconstructing an earlier work by documentary photographer Galai. ‘Vertical Vista’ explores the checkerboard like design of the space of east Jerusalem, in which Jewish settlements were built to break the contiguity of Palestinian villages and towns. This particular landscape exposes the spatial logic of the ethnic construction of the city and contains within it many of the markers that proliferate throughout the city that function as a visual legend to the spatial language of the city. The installation explores ways of making that legend legible by physically deconstructing and reconstructing the printed image along the seams that separate the territories belonging to the communities and by using colour and different techniques highlighting elements that convey the work of political power. The installation allows audiences to directly interact with and disrupt the image with the aim of exposing otherwise invisible political historical fault lines and forms of colonisation in the landscape of the West Bank. Audiences are invited to tear the image apart ‘at the seams’. This installation is funded in part by HARI (RHUL).