Amid COVID-19, Tel Aviv's Tmuna Theater opens virtual museum

The curtain raiser is an exhibition titled “Events Horizon” that is due to open on the last day of this troubled calendar year.

By BARRY DAVIS
THE ‘EL-ARAKIB Struggle Museum’ installation tells the continuing sorry tale of the eponymous Bedouin village which has been destroyed by the state over 100 times. (photo credit: Courtesy)
THE ‘EL-ARAKIB Struggle Museum’ installation tells the continuing sorry tale of the eponymous Bedouin village which has been destroyed by the state over 100 times.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The pandemic has changed the cultural scene in this country and elsewhere out of all recognition. It is now almost inconceivable to simply see an ad for a show you might want to go to, purchase a ticket online and then trundle on over to the venue in question on the specified date and at the appointed hour. And even though museums reopened for a while, as per the purple badge constraints, there is still little of the laissez faire vibe about cultural consumerism we never dreamed we’d lose, and never really appreciated while it was around.
As the first lockdown took hold and it became clear this was no overnighter, museums and other purveyors of the arts began to dip into the domain of virtual presentation to keep the public on board and aware of what they had to offer. Zoom, You Tube, Facebook and practically any Internet-based platform available has become the de rigueur way to go.
Now the Tmuna Theater venue in Tel Aviv, a popular outlet for mainstream and left field-leaning theatrical and musical ventures in pre-corona times, has decided to take matters a step further by establishing a brand new virtual museum, naturally enough called the Tmuna Museum.
The curtain raiser is an exhibition titled “Events Horizon” that is due to open on the last day of this troubled calendar year. Nitzan Cohen, who co-curated the show alongside Erez Maayan Shalev, and has accumulated a pretty impressive bio as a theater producer over the years, feels the show moniker has pandemic-pertinent undertones. Event horizon, a term taken from astrophysics, relates to the edge of a black hole in outer space beyond which nothing is visible.
“Even in normal times there are all sorts of things going on in the country that we would prefer to turn a blind to,” says Cohen. “Now, with the coronavirus and all that, it is easier for the government to hide even more things they get up to.”
With that curatorial mindset in place, one may assume that “Events Horizon” is not exactly oriented toward the Disneyland end of the entertainment-cultural spectrum. One work in the new exhibition conveys that dark undercurrent in concise fashion. The “El-Arakib Struggle Museum” installation, created by Cohen, Einat Weizman and Aziz Alturi, tells the continuing sorry tale of the eponymous Bedouin village, located 10 km. north of Beersheba, which incredibly has been destroyed by the state over 100 times. The village, which was established before the creation of the state, was evacuated by the IDF in 1951. The land was expropriated and subsequently leased to the Israel Land Administration. Ongoing protests and legal proceedings have yet to reestablish it.
“The work presents our culture, the culture of repression, against the struggle of El-Arakib,” Cohen explains. “The museum directs the spotlight to us, to the actions taken in our name, and to the ways in which the inhabitants of El-Arakib respond.”
To date the village has been demolished in excess of 100 times, and has become a symbol of the unrecognized Bedouin settlements across the Negev. Amazingly, the villagers have also been charged for the state’s financial outlay on the demolition work.
“That is a crime, and references the things we prefer to ignore,” Cohen continues.
There are plenty more thought provokers in the exhibition lineup where that came from. The overriding theme tends toward the twilight zone between awareness of the world around us and the areas we are more likely to sidestep, or simply not consciously register.
One work, “While I Was Watching Netflix” – if there was ever a definitively lockdown-compatible title, this would probably be the one – a sound installation by Noam Tomkin, Erez Schwarzbaum and, principally, Iris Muallem, harps on the interface element, feeding off the work of a sinkhole researcher. The latter, a geologist by the name of Eli Raz, experienced the perilous aspect of his daytime job when he dropped several meters into a sinkhole, and was almost buried alive. “He spent 12 hours in there and even wrote out his will on pieces of toilet paper he had with him. It was that bad,” Cohen notes.
The co-curator says the main creator of the work discerned an overlap between “While I Was Watching Netflix” and the fallout of our current health scare predicament.
“When Iris began to research sinkholes, she looked on it as a metaphor to our situation today. She saw it as a sort of black hole. Again, that references what we do or don’t know about COVID-19 and the way it is being handled by the authorities.”
There is plenty of emotional and emotive baggage betwixt the more cerebral offerings too, such as “The Son’s Room” video work by Nadav Bosem, whose adopted child was taken away from him and his male partner by the authorities, according to the co-curator for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, “Four Corners” by Tmuna theater artistic director Nava Zuckerman, a dramatic Zoom- and Facebook-tailored drama, addresses a range of seasonal topics, such as our fear of the pandemic, how to live with it, how it impacts on our emotional well-being and thoughts of the future.
Cohen is hopeful the new online venture will draw an abundance of lockdown and post-lockdown cultural consumers and help keep the flame of creativity burning brightly.
“The coronavirus arrived and people shuddered to a standstill,” he says. “But we [at Tmuna] have never stopped. We have put things out online, interviews, works. We [artists] feel that they [authorities] are trying to shackle us. But we won’t stop.”
For more information: www.facebook.com/tmunaTelAviv/ and www.tmu-na.org.il/


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