(2024)
2019-2024 is the name of the graduate exhibition of the School of Architecture at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. It was held at the end of the 2023-2024 academic year. The exhibition features works from across six different theme-based classrooms, a showcase of student models from mid-degree students at the school, a catalog of works, and a listening area featuring sound art.
The exhibition is based on three collaborations. The first is a collaboration with Pal-Ram, a company which donated materials necessary for the installation and display of students’ works. The second collaboration was with Israeli authors who wrote interpretive texts for the exhibition catalog. All student projects were divided into nine categories, or terms, with each term representing some sort of ‘still agent’ in the public space, an object which is in charge of what stays and what goes, what remains in or out. For each term, we invited an author to write a text that refers to the term itself and to the works of the students. And the third collaboration behind the exhibition is with the ‘new music’ department at the Musrara School, which created sound works based on outdoor recordings for the balcony installation.
Curatorial text:
On April 15, 2019, at 18:40, the windows of the buildings to the east of the Archbishop's Bridge facing west were painted a glistening orange. Hundreds gathered near La Tournelle Bridge, some took photos, others spoke, some smiled awkwardly. The fire that erupted from the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral spread out to the trees and down to the prayer floor. The Seine River surrounding the Ile de la Cité became the boundary – 27 meters wide at its narrowest point, 130 meters at its widest – between life and danger. The outside, the open, unprotected place, spread out from the inside for a few hours, in the heart of Paris.
In March 2020, Israel, almost simultaneously with the rest of the world, redefined its internal and external borders. Space was divided between essential uses and those that are not. Borders and border crossings multiplied, checkpoints redoubled, heralding new regulations and norms that went beyond the checkpoints themselves. Opening a door in the bedroom to go out to the kitchen or to the bathroom became a fateful event. Wooden birch doors, shining in white, retro style, embedded with nickel strips, separated between our domestic spaces, between the positive and the negative. Work went indoors, all the walls parallel to the computer screen on its illuminated side became facades.
At that same time, Israeli government policy expanded the reaches of its foreign affairs, reaching outwards. In September 2021, the first commercial aircraft took off from Tel Aviv Airport and landed in Dubai. If the map flashing on the board in that aircraft’s cockpit showed the names of the
localities on the way between the two airports, ‘within the border’, you would surely be able to find Hadid, Deir Nisam, Rawabi, Mazraa A Sharaqiya, Biddin, Al Hariq, Aal Yyarya and Sabkhah
Since 2022 in Massafer Yatta, in the area between Hirbet Jinba and Hirbet Assfi-A-Tahta, above the underground living caves where residents dwell, live-fire training began to take place. Inside faced downwards, the outside faced up. The houses and their inhabitants were first confined into the ground by decree and then pressed beyond its boundaries, out of context.
Later that year, outside of the atmosphere, 2.4 million light-years away, a massive star collapsed into itself, its outer layers exploded as a supernova, and its heart compressed into a black hole. Through the lens of the telescope, here, on the planet Earth, the brightest explosion of all time looked like a fire emergency lamp or a dancefloor strobe light.
In October last year, the sovereignty of the State of Israel was violated. The border fence was breached, leading the entire region to a bloody war that is still marching on. On October 26, a new regulation issued by Home Front Command superseded the decisions of municipal authorities, allowing the construction of Safe Rooms in the Israeli residential areas regardless of permit. The walls, the boundaries, are moving inward, towards us, farther from out there.
55 works by 68 students are displayed at the Architecture School Graduate Exhibition in Bezalel in 2024. These students trained in the profession of architecture during these years when the relations between inside and out were challenged and reassessed time and time again.
In the relationship between figure and ground, we would like to invite those visiting this exhibition to actively remember the unstable 'ground' layer, the times in which these students studied; while regarding the ‘figure’, the architectural projects they produced, even if there is no direct or immediate connection between them.
The works presented before you form a body driven by crisis and change; they tell of an architecture in constant and fierce pursuit of an agenda and self-concept.