Curated by: Neta Gal- Atzmon
Associate Curator: Hagar Brill
Artists: Nelly Agassi, Amit Berlowitz, Ori Gersht, Gal Weinstein, Michal Chelbin, Leahy Chen, Jan Tichy, my violin, earthy Canaanite, Eyal Segal, Einat Arif Galanti.
Quarantine | Video and Sound Exhibition
Hansen House, Jerusalem (Leper House), October-November 2013Quarantine exhibition presented within a unique structure in the heart of Jerusalem grove of trees in the city.
Until 2000 the building served as a shelter for the mentally Hansen’s disease (leprosy; Leprosy Latin), and as a group of people of all faiths have found themselves isolated from their natural environment.
Besides the relationship with the medical staff, patients contact Hansen House with the world outside the high wall that surrounded him was very limited. Large front yard of the hospital building small farm cultivated and cisterns, which supplied the bulk of their needs. Garden – heaven and hell together.
This exhibition, which opens the complex new identity as a center for design, media and technology, maintains a dialogue with its unique historical past of the place and is a personal tribute to my mysterious neighbors and youth accompanied my childhood and my youth in the nearby neighborhood house to Hansen.
This quiet complex has always tried to keep prevailed in most parts of the exhibition. Other works on exhibit reflect the sense of difficulty and perhaps suffocation was also probably order some of the patients, residents Hansen House.
Source term ” quarantine ” ( blockade ) is the Italian word Koorenta (quaranta) means – ” forty “, because of the forty days of isolation imposed medieval salts ships arriving from infected everything, as to prevent the spread of the deadly scourge known as the ” Black Death”. The history of epidemics associated with the entire length exclusion and isolation.
Michel Foucault discusses his book “History of insanity in the age of reason “marking and staining of the Shrew defined except by the community. Poor book is sociological teachings – philosophy and shows how society defines the boundaries of the ’normal’ by exclusion and condemnation of scapegoats. In the Middle Ages, he argues, have been lepers for this position, and the Age of Reason were lunatics”. At the end of the Middle Ages leprosy left him from the western world. Edge of the settlement, the gates of cities, lay people being no longer Keenan them but endowed with sterility and non- kosher seat a person for a long time. Hundreds of years would such spaces meet Bazovtm [ … ] would they wait and call spells – magic strange new embodiment of sickness, another grimace of fear, and renewed rituals of cleansing and deportation”.
The starting point of Quarantine is the extreme situation of people physically isolated from their surroundings. However, it touches the deepest and subtlest of experience loneliness and disconnection existential experience.
Collection of works in the exhibition deals with a sense of closure (mentally or physically), quiet and gentle emotion of introspection , listening to the voices of women in the noise. Presentation of these works precisely where the sense of emotional detachment due hangs real, physical, perhaps blurs the differences between forced out of isolation and loneliness of man in a given situation. The sense of alienation and existential loneliness, the experience which the seller, the home, is both foreign and threatening, the foreign line in intimate Freud described in 1919 in his essay “Albi ” (Das Unheimliche). That case writes Albert Camus in his book ” The Myth of Sisyphus : An Essay on the Absurd ” : ” Here alienation. You see that the world Compress , you can see how the stone worship, an succumbs to us, and to what intensity can negate us to nature or landscape. Depths of all Beauty lies in something – human , and these hills, tender sky, describes the trees lose right now false meaning we wore them, and now they are far more protective – paradise lost. initial hostility of the world returns to us through thousands of years [ … ] the world slipping away from us because he returned to being himself [ … ] as there are days in which we see a familiar face behind the woman we loved months or years a foreign character, yes maybe we will ask us the thing that made us so suddenly single. But the time has not come yet. just say one thing: this compression of the world and the alienation of his are the absurd. “
The Hansen Center for Design, Media and Technology
The Hansen Compound was built by the Protestant community in Jerusalem in 1887 as a leprosy asylum. Planned by Conrad Schick, a member of the protestant community and one of the prominent architects working in Jerusalem in the 19th century, it has served its original purpose for over a century.
The walled compound was erected at a distance from the old-city’s walls, at a site which at the time was far-removed and secluded. Over the years, as Jerusalem expanded beyond its historic walls, the hospital gradually came to be surrounded by residential neighborhoods. It’s aura of mystery, however, subsisted. Often rumored to be a ’closed institution’, its doors were in fact open, allowing both incoming visits from friends and family and the free exit of patients.
The hospital was designed to be self-sufficient, with a sizable produce garden as well as a pen and a cowshed on its very grounds. These were attended to by the inmates and hospital staff. Hence fruits, vegetables, drinking water, milk and wool were readily available. Cows and sheep grazed on the nearby hill, where the Jerusalem Theater currently stands.
Originally named ’Jesus Hilfe’ (the name is engraved above the main entrance), it later came to be known as ’the leprosy asylum’. In 1950 the hospital was sold to the Jewish National Fund and placed under the management of Israel’s Health Ministry. It was renamed ’the Hansen Governmental Hospital for Leprosy’, after the Norwegian physician who identified the leprosy bacterium. In the second half of the 20th century, as antibiotic treatment grew more efficient, patients were gradually being discharged. Since 2000 the hospital no longer admitted patients for hospitalization, operating solely as an ambulatory clinic until its definite closure, in 2009.
Located at the Talbiya neighborhood, the edifice has been declared a listed monument due to its historic and architectonic value. Following its closure the building was entrusted in the hands of the Jerusalem Municipality, which has been put in charge of its restoration and consequent reopening as a cultural center. Planning and restoration works have been carried out through 2011–2013, headed by the Jerusalem Development Fund in cooperation with the municipality and the Jewish National Fund, with additional funding from the Ministry of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs.
Quarantine exhibition presented within a unique structure in the heart of Jerusalem grove of trees in the city.
Te establishment is set to reopen as a center for design, media and technology. Public facilities will include exhibition spaces, an auditorium, a sound lab, a historical exhibit, interactive and new media installations, a ’fabrication lab’ and a cafeteria. In addition to these the center will host residencies for artists and designers specialized in media and technology, as well as post-graduate programs in design and technology from the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design.
