Forbidden Streets

Year: 2003

Location: Street signs, on the roads leading to the Museum of Underground Prisoners, Jerusalem

With Artists: Noam Kuzar and Eldad Cidor

The exhibition Art Focus 4 was held in 2003 at the Museum of Underground Prisoners in Jerusalem. Our activities included the removal of the street signs on the roads leading to the exhibition (in the dead of night) and replacing them with street signs bearing alternative names. For example:

* We took down the street sign which read Rehov Heshin (Heshin Street, where the Supreme Court was once situated) and replaced it with a sign which read: B'TSELEM, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories Boulevard

* We took down the street which read Mishol Hagvura (The Heroic Path) and replaced it with a sign which read: The Alley of Physicians for Human Rights – Israel

For Further Reading...

Art Focus was an Israeli artistic project whose aim was to expose fine arts in Israel to the international art market. It first took place in 1994, and operated like a kind of international art biennale or triennale. Five such events were held, the last one in 2008. The location for Art Focus 4, chosen by the curators Yigal Zalmona and Susan Landau, was the Museum of Underground Prisoners, which is part the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, where a police station is also situated. The site belongs to the Ministry of Defense, and the compound is imbued with deep significance due to its proximity to the holding cells at the adjacent police station, and because of the dramatic impact on an audience, which is essentially inside a prison while its members visit the exhibit. The artists of the Sala manca group had discovered the potential inherent in the location several months before, when they used it for the site of a powerful exhibition, they created with non-establishment artists.

In advance of Art Focus 4, participating artists were asked to sign a contract which among other things stated: "Whereas it was made clear to the artist that the work will not include exhibits and presentations which infringe on the spirit of the location, and the museum reserves the right to ask the artist to make changes in his/her work, so that it will not in any way mar the spirit of the location." The artists were informed that the reason for the contract was that the building belongs to the Ministry of Defense.

During the very days leading up to the exhibition, we learned that the installation of the artist Hagar Goren – which also comprised the distribution of pamphlets providing information about human rights organizations – had been censored. On the day of the opening Goren set up a stand in the entrance plaza leading to the exhibition, outside the compound. In protest at the censorship, a group of artists staged an alternative exhibition adjacent to the museum.

During the exhibition's opening our group distributed flyers at the entrance plaza, explaining the background to our protest. The following is an excerpt from the text: "It seems to us that the statement, 'The artists were instructed by the curators to relate in their works to a leveraging of the contexts suggested by the location – from Crusaders and nuns to imprisonment and the fantasy of liberation from it,' cannot be disconnected from the reality in which we live. Is it even possible to create a non-political work in the space that was chosen? We see our work as a declaration of identification with artists and organizations which the establishment is trying to drive to the edges of the discourse. These organizations are worthy of recognition for their role in protecting the Israeli democracy, and their positions should be preserved in the names of street signs."

Looking back, I can scarcely believe that we managed to switch the signs, especially in light of the presence of the security cameras outside the Supreme Court. Furthermore, our signs remained in place for several weeks before they were taken down.