Jerusalem art school presents at Ars Electronica in Austria

Founded in 1979, the Austrian bash is run by the Ars Electronica Linz GmbH cultural, educational, and scientific institute, which primarily operates in the field of new media art.

The annual event’s full title includes the epexegetical addendum Festival for Art, Technology & Society, which clearly suits the Jerusalem institution’s wide-ranging credo. “It links technology to art and innovation and, naturally, society,” notes Naggar’s founder director, Avi Sabag-Sharvit. “But, primarily, it spans different genres. That suits us.”

Sabag-Sharvit is more than a little pleased with the school’s inclusion in the Linz lineup, even though we are hardly talking debut showing at Ars Electronica.

“This is our sixth year running at the festival,” he says, with more than a hint of well-deserved pride. He says he was very specific from the outset about where he wanted the school to strut its stuff over there. “We connected with the Campus project. I believed it was very important to connect with and focus on the domain that exhibits [the work of] students, not [full-fledged] artists.”

That, Sabag-Sharvit feels, suits the Musrara school’s ethos, and possibly goes some way to redressing Israel’s negative image in the media.

“We are a school of art. We nurture our graduates too, but we are delighted to feature in the Campus project each year. You can see we represent Israel there.” That, despite a political climate rife with anti-Israel sensibilities and vitriol. The Ars Electronica foray is a breath of fresh apolitical air for us all.

For their part, Shalit Glick and Weisselberg are simply raring to go.

“We are looking forward to it,” Shalit Glick enthuses, adding that their spot at Ars Electronica is not only a wonderful opportunity to take their bow on an international stage, but it is also a rare opportunity to mingle with and meet some of their offshore peers and perhaps exchange ideas and see where they each come from on cultural and pure artistic levels.

The Shalit Glick-Weisselberg video-and-sound-based double act will run on September 6 and 7, at 4:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. respectively, in the Campus Events category. The performance incorporates shards of visual and sonic logs fueled by memories, dreams, and altered states of consciousness. It follows, then, that the work tends toward the ethereal.

“We generally appear behind a cloth, or curtain,” Shalit Glick notes. That tends to blur the artists’ physical contours and leave the viewer with visual interpretative room for maneuver. “The ambiance is very dreamy. It is in a sort of twilight zone between dream, reality, and illusion,” Weisselberg adds. “It is an idiom we used often – concealment and revelation, in our [performance] language and visibility. There is something very visual which helps to develop the imagination.”

There is a scripted textual side to the work, too – part in English, part in Hebrew. The fact that the audience in Linz will not understand all the verbal component reflects another element in the artists’ toolbox. “We engage in languages as raw material,” Weisselberg explains. “Language has a certain sound. Hebrew is very staccato, while English is rounder. We are drawn musically to the context of language.”

Therein can lie the power of a work of art or, indeed, staged show, whereby the performers employ a linguistic vocabulary that is incomprehensible to the spectators but still manages to convey the spirit and essence, and possibly the actual meaning, of their creation.

As in all aspects of our life here in the Promised Land, and even when one manages to get some downtime from local tensions in foreign pastures, Oct. 7 and its seemingly never-ending aftermath constantly hover in the background. That sad fact of life comes through in the installation title.

“The sound and lighting installation is actually called Water Appears,” Shalit Glick advises, after I note a couple of monikers in the press release I was sent. The sonic backdrop to the work includes a suggestion of rhythmic water dripping. “Water appears suddenly, like emotions that unexpectedly rise to the surface. There is always a lot of emotion in our combined work,” she chuckles. “[The Hamas attack of] Oct. 7 was also something sudden – suddenly we are at war, suddenly the war ends.”

Really? Is that just wishful thinking, or is Shalit Glick in on some highly confidential military-political dossier? “I want to believe the war will end some time,” she explains.

Time will tell. But for now, we can bask in the rare opportunity of a couple of young Israeli artists being allowed to show what they can do at a prestigious global event. Hopefully, Shalit Glick and Weisselberg will get to do their creative apolitical thing without any disruptive detritus getting in on their act.