1994 Urban Traces

Paintings, works on paper, photography (photogram) dealing with the issue of erased memories in the urban fabric of Haifa.

Exhibitions/events - 1994 Israel, Jerusalem: Israel Museum - 2009 Israel, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum of Art - 2011 France, Marseilles: Maison Blanche - 2008 Israel, Tel Aviv: Yair Gallery - 1996 France, Paris: Galerie Renos Xippas - 1994 Israel, Beer Sheva: Avraham Baron Art Gallery Ben Gurion University Credits - Irith Hadar [curator Prints and Drawings Tel Aviv Museum of Art] - Meidad Suchowolski [photographer] - Meira Peri [curating] - Avraham Baron Art Gallery [support financial and technical] - Galerie Renos Xippas [support financial and technical] - Haifa Arts Foundation [financial support] - Israel Museum [financial support] - Israel Museum [technical support] - Israel Phoenix Assurance Co. Ltd [financial support] - Israeli Consulate Marseilles [financial support] - Maison Blanche [financial support] - Maison Blanche [technical support] - Reuben and Edith Hecht Trust [financial support] - Tel Aviv Museum of Art [financial support] - Tel Aviv Museum of Art [technical support] - Yair Gallery [support financial and technical] 1994 Urban Traces Urban Traces Urban Traces are works on paper, which I have been creating since the first moment my curiosity about the Prophets’ Tower building in dowtown Haifa was awakened. For me, they are a sort of travel diary of my work process on the project of the Villa Khury/The Prophets’ Tower. Urban Traces form a multi-layered mental cartography. Specific urban experiences are discernible in the drawings. The historical geography of the city can never be reduced to the sum of its objective characteristics. Rather, it is made up of all the experiences, daily rounds, and lifetime journeys which take place in it and expand it endlessly. These are these different layers and movements that I tried to condense in the drawings. An important contribution to my thinking on this is a letter I received from Jacques Derrida whom I had had the privilege to meet during my stay in the Cité des Arts in Paris in 1995-1996 when I attended his weekly lectures in the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. After one of the lectures, I approached him to talk about my drawings Urban Traces. He asked to see more works in my studio. On one occasion I visited him in his office in order to show him new drawings. He invited me to sit and then began to write a letter. The drawings are like a “seismic tremor” (the term Derrida used in the letter). They reflect moments of trembling, shivering, shaking, quaking, quake, shake, tremor, pulsation. They trace the feeling of the invisible – that is, an existence which has been erased without leaving any landmark. The only topographical landmark is the Prophets’ Tower which does not, however, represent the existence of the Arab population. On the contrary, the modern building in such a vernacular surrounding is an intrusion, a perturbation in the Arab district that had been erased from downtown Haifa. In addition, even memory is erased from the public space. We face a total erasure: of Palestinian memory, and at the same time of Jewish memory, deprived of the entire story, so that it becomes a memory involving destruction. The drawings, a complex of concrete fragments (recalling the broken reflections on the windows of the Prophets’ Tower) which navigate in the space (of the paper), the traces of other concrete fragments, constitute my mental map of the city. As effacement underlies them, they attest that there is always some layer of meaning, substance, being which is not immediately discernible. They reflect my emotional reaction toward the geographical history of the site. The act of erasure is not a simple act of destruction. Erasure in such a context functions as an exposure that allows for the presence of nothingness.