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Performance Artists Take Over the Tel Aviv Museum of Art

For the past six weeks, the Israel 'performative research body' Public Movement has turned the institution into a stage to question the relationship between the state and its cultural institutions.
Public Movement, National Collection, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2015, Photos by: Kfir Bolotin

For the past six weeks, Public Movement staged a series of performances in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to explore Israel’s relationship with its cultural institutions. National Collection, which began on the 28th of October and ends this week, is the first durational performance to be executed in the country as a museum exhibition. For Public Movement, however, it is just the latest of many years of public art and activism.

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Founded in 2006 by Dana Yahalomi and Omer Krieger—and now led solely by Yahalomi—Public Movement is a self-described performative research body that taps into the political and social capacities of public performance. In each project, their choreographed movements are inspired by social orders, rituals, and political actions such as marches, protests, folk dances, and even “inventing and reenacting moments in the lives of individuals.” The group often dons a uniform to create illusions of collectivity and synchronicity. The most iconic of these, as worn in National Collection, is all white—save a simple black belt with silver buckle—although it is not uncommon for the group to wear other variations of homogenous costumes or simply plainclothes, depending on the situation.

Despite their outward uniformity, however, the members of the group are extremely diverse. The eleven person crew contains gymnastic champions, former policewomen, ballerinas, and public officers—and at their head, Yahalomi, whose own mini-bio on the group’s page informs that she was a champion roller skater, an instructor in the Working and Studying Youth movement, and that she “kissed with the security officer during the trip to Poland…”

Public Movement's work is inspired by and evokes specific historical moments or contemporary polemics which Public Movement revisits or investigates. For instance, in the second of a series titled “Performing Politics for Germany,” the group created a mass event in the streets of Berlin called First of May Riots. Recalling a history of heated May Day protests in Germany dating back to the memorable 1987 demonstrations in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, the performance included thousands of citizens immersed in scenes of fire, broken glass, and water cannons. Added to the chaos was a five-channel radio coverage with music, talk, news, DJs, and a live sociological commentary from professors from Berlin universities. More recently, at the New Museum’s Triennial in 2012, the groups’ Birthright Palestine? salons broke down the fundamental implications of the institution of Birthright Israel under the hypothetical proposal of a similar program for Palestine.

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The current performance has its roots in one of the first of the group's projects: a 2007 performance called The Israeli Museum, where the group acted out wreath laying ceremony at the former location of the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, now Independence Hall, recalling Israel’s decision in 1948 to make the museum the country’s main exhibition space. National Collection, nearly a decade after, returns to the Museum with a new set of inquiries about the cultural institution as a space for public discourse.

"Public Movement regards the Museum as an arena where civic behavior in public space is molded according to the ideals of a democratic society,” the group’s project description reads. “[This project] examines the Museum as a site and set of activities through which national and cultural identity are defined.” The performance problematizes the neutrality of the museum space in times of international conflict and suggests that instead, such an institution can be seen as a kind of political and social stage. Included in National Collection are parts of old performances—such as scenes similar to the 2008 performance, Emergencyas well as a one-on-one visitor-performer experience called Debriefing Session II, a fictionalized glimpse into the group’s creative transference of research into action.

Below, more scenes from National Collection.

Find out more about Public Movement on their website.

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