A stop in time

Fourteen pivotal objects from the Israel Museum’s collection illustrate the unfolding of civilization from the dawn of humanity to contemporary life

By BARRY DAVIS
‘Crossroads,’ by Bruce Connor, 1976. (photo credit: ISRAEL MUSEUM)
‘Crossroads,’ by Bruce Connor, 1976.
(photo credit: ISRAEL MUSEUM)
Want to know more about the history of the human species? A lot more? Surely you don’t have the time to follow up on several hundreds of thousands, not to mention millions, of years of evolution.
But if you’d still like to get a handle on how we got from wrapping our head around getting a fire going so we could, at long last, get a nice cooked meal down us, to producing weapons of mass destruction, a trip to the Israel Museum’s new “A Brief History of Humankind” exhibition – which opened on May 1 – could certainly help to move you along in the desired direction.
The exhibition, which was curated by Tania Coen-Uzzielli and Efrat Klein, is a fun and informative affair, and suitably visually arresting. “The exhibition is really the product of three different ideas,” Coen-Uzzielli explains. “The initial spark came from reading the book.”
The tome in question is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, written by Hebrew University lecturer Prof. Yuval Noah Harari. The book came out last year and became an instant smash hit; thus far, it has been translated into close to 30 languages.
Coen-Uzzielli was properly inspired by the book, and immediately began considering ways of making the content aesthetically appealing and attractive to the general public. “I come from the arts so as I read the book, I visualized it,” continues the curator. “That’s where the idea for the exhibition came from.”
Coen-Uzzielli says she didn’t have to go too far to find the raw materials for the new display, and simply mined the artifacts already nestling comfortably within the museum’s walls. “The images I visualized from the book were not just any old pictures, they were images of things we had at the Israel Museum. It was like [1980s movie] When Harry Met Sally – it was ‘The Israel Museum meets Yuval Harari’s book,’ which spawned the exhibition.”
Naturally, you can’t go into all the factual and historical nooks and crannies when assembling a display designed to convey such a gargantuan time continuum for public consumption, and you can’t cram the entire content of such a temporally expansive book into a single show. “You can’t start from the hunter and show all the implements he used and all the rest,” asserts Coen-Uzzielli.
Instead, the curator went for a connect-the- dots approach. “I decided to take an artifact and isolate it, then I approached it through the eyes of an archeologist.”
The curator happens to have a degree in Roman and Byzantine archeology. “An archeological find has meaning, and is a sort of milestone. I got 14 milestones together.”
That station-based mind-set eventually led to the Humankind layout. The museum’s concise retelling of human development passes through the prism of 14 pivotal objects from its holdings, which illustrate the unfolding of civilization from the dawn of human civilization to contemporary life.
The objects on view offer a pleasingly panoramic glimpse of how things have panned out across the millennia, taking in such definitive historical landmarks as the remains of the first use of fire in a communal setting, the first tools used by humankind, rare examples of the coexistence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, and the earliest evidence of writing and numerals.
Cash eventually enters the human fray and the exhibition sequence references the first coins, moves smoothly into a religious mode with ancient written evidence of the Ten Commandments, jumps into a far more modern evolutionary phase with the discovery of electricity, and concludes with the manuscript of Albert Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.
True to its thoroughly entertaining ethos, the last item in the humankind timeframe is dramatically visually supported by footage of US atomic bomb tests, with the all too familiar but spookily alluring mushroom cloud billowing its way into our precious troposphere.
But the curator doesn’t want us to just merrily stroll our way through the exhibition rooms. She is keen for us to take some important messages on board, and leave with plenty to mull over on our way home, or back to school. “I created a different environment for the 14 objects, which is not their natural surroundings,” she reveals. “These are settings which provoke thought, settings which in some way, bring out the fundamental significance of each object.”
Part of that thinking, says Coen- Uzzielli, harks back to the Harari book.
“Yuval doesn’t just proceed through the annals of time. He goes back and forth, and intentionally shakes things up, to get us to set our minds to things which we might otherwise just skip through. That’s what I have done with this exhibition, too.”
There are all sorts of moral issues that go along with the curator’s territory.
“We think we learned how to make fire, and we control it,” she continues. “We control it? Just think, for example, about what happened on Mount Carmel and the devastating fire there [in 2010].”
There is also, possibly, something for the non-meat eaters among us – in the shape of a large, cuddly-looking, polarbear- shaped creature. “We kill the animals that threaten us, but why do we kill the others as well?” poses Coen-Uzzielli.
Video also plays a major role in illuminating the exhibition subtexts, particularly in imparting the idea of the evils inherent in consumerism. The latter, we are told, becomes a negative factor when humans produce more than they need. That is somewhat comically but graphically conveyed in the three-screen video work “History Zero” by Greek artist Stefanos Tsivopoulos.
All the historically oriented exhibits along the timeline are supported and amplified by contemporary works of art, which fits in nicely with the chronological ping-pong theme, also bringing the items on display into the here and now. 
“A Brief History of Humankind” will run until January 2, 2016. For more information: www.imj.org.il/


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