Domestic power

This year’s Musrara Mix festival will focus on the home as a revolutionary agent.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Installation by Alona Rodeh 521 (photo credit: Courtesy Musrara Mix)
Installation by Alona Rodeh 521
(photo credit: Courtesy Musrara Mix)
Next week, the narrow streets of Musrara and some of its courtyards will, for the 12th consecutive year, be transformed into a vast open gallery of the arts.
“Chaos in Musrara – the Revolution Begins at Home” – the annual interdisciplinary international arts festival of Musrara’s Naggar School of Photography – is back, this year taking place from May 22 to 24. Faithful to its original mission of social commitment through art, the school management, specifically founder and director Avi Sabag, continues to test the boundaries of socially engaged art, involving local and international students and artists, area residents and aficionados from everywhere. In the once-borderline neighborhood and the recently renovated gallery of the school, works by students and alumni will share space with works by international artists specially invited to take part.
The essence of the festival, which has gained prestige over the years, attracting visitors and artists from across Israel and around the world, is a look at both art and social sectors, presenting Musrara as a typical periphery community. A large part of the exhibitions will be inside the houses and courtyards of the neighborhood’s residents, mostly North African immigrants who came in the early ’50s.
This year marks 25 years since the school’s establishment. In a direct link to the social protest events of the last few months, particularly in Jerusalem – where one of the most well-known protest movements, the Black Panthers, took shape in Musrara in the 1970s – the festival is dedicated to this spirit of protest.
According to Sabag, who is also chief curator of the festival’s main exhibition, the event represents the school’s ideology – “the belief that art has a strengthening and constructive role in society as it turns our gaze into society and the identities within it.”
Every year, the festival aims to shed light on the point where art, music and society meet. This year, explains Sabag, the Musrara Mix festival will focus on homemade revolutions, “fantasizing about the home as a revolutionary agent, one that creates chaos and then invents a new order.”
There will be eight performances at the festival, all presenting fairy tales touching on what “home” is. Each will deal with a different aspect of home, such as traditions, consuming, and inside/outside atmosphere. Among the participants will be visiting artists from Turkey, Korea, Iran (though living in Europe), New Zealand and Japan. The performances will run each of the three days between 8 p.m. and 11:30 p.m., in the various facilities in the neighborhood – the building of the school itself, the gallery on the first floor, the courtyards around and near the community center.
In addition to mixed-media performances of video art and music, the women of the neighborhood have been invited to present their traditional dishes, which they will prepare in an ad-hoc pre-installed kitchen in one of the courtyards. The music performances will include electro-acoustic ensembles, as well as audio-video programs, courtesy of students from the school’s music department.
“Chaos in Three, Four & Six” is the product of a collaboration between students from the Musrara School’s music and new media departments, and the students from the choreography program in the Jerusalem Academy for Music and Dance. This will show on all three days of the festival at 10 Daniel Street, at the Musrara Community Center sports field, at 8:30 p.m.
Tickets to the musical performances and guided tours (private and groups) are available at 628- 519 x109, or inbal@musraragallery.org.il.

Guided tours through the neighborhood and the exhibitions will take place Tuesday and Thursday at 8:30 p.m., meeting at 9 Ha’ayin Het Street, at a cost of NIS 25 per person. Tickets are available at the information desk and in the café.