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Guerilla artist’s exhibit documents the despoliation of Jerusalem

Posted on July 22, 2007 • By Gil Zohar
Category: Art and Culture, Featured |

Guerilla artist and photographer Yoram Amir has made a career documenting the changing face of Jerusalem. And as his current “Jeru$alem” photograph series exhibit shows, it’s not a change which he views for the better.

“Jeru$alem”, which was on display at The Jerusalem Cinematheque during the recent Jerusalem Film Festival, utilizes antique horseshoe-shaped wooden window frames to display his documentation of the destruction of the traditional city. Amir salvaged the windows from the Palace Hotel on Agron Street, the facade and lobby of which are being preserved in yet another real estate mega-project appealing to overseas Jews. Together the photos and frames make a disturbing anti-consumer message about Jerusalem being reduced to a caricature of herself.

Interviewed at his Shodedei Yam Gallery in Jerusalem’s Machane Yehuda market - the name is a Hebrew pun meaning both sea pirates and brigands of Jerusalem - the 44-year-old artist decried that rapacious real estate developers are destroying the Holy City’s unique character through cheap, overly tall buildings that rip away at the city’s urban fabric.

He warned of “the conspiracy of stealing the landscape. No one is guarding the city for the next century,” he warned. “Nobody is building structures that will last 400 years. Jerusalem of Gold is becoming Jerusalem of concrete.” “For a time I was Chairman of the Market Committee. Did you know that in the whole Machane Yehuda market there aren’t normal and clean public bathrooms? That for me is the base that you have to fight for.”

The aesthetics of the artist’s beloved Jerusalem are being relentlessly destroyed by “monster buildings” being erected in a “culture of copying” that is part of an “architectural disdain” for the city’s heritage, he said. Amir criticized the process whereby Jerusalem has been turned into a commodity “that advances the interests of foreign real estate developers. The capitalist corporate system is pollution to [Jerusalem's] streets.”

Cinematheque founder Lia Van Leer chose Amir’s exhibit because of its connection to Jerusalem’s budding environmental movement, he explained. Amir was one of the first activists in the city to oppose the so-called Safdie Plan to build suburban housing on the Judean Hills west of the city.

Canadian-Israeli lawyer Mike Dacks elaborated on Amir’s work: “For a Western admirer of underground Israeli art, Yoram has some of the coolest and most unique installations I’ve come across. His photographs highlight the paradoxical nature of contemporary Jerusalem - the relations between the secular and religious in the city, the contrast between the old and the new, or the constant interaction and power dynamic between the Arab and Jewish sectors of the city, and the rich and the poor on all sides. He has a great knack for uncovering - often ironically - deeper truths about Israeli society that are only rarely accessible to Westerners.

“He is far from crazy - rather the opposite. He is the completely natural result of Israeli society. The guy was an officer in the paratroopers in the early 1980s and within the span of a year fought both in Beirut against the PLO and also in removing Jewish settlers from the Sinai. Born into a Moroccan family and not given all the opportunities that other sectors of Israeli society were afforded, he’s watched these skyscrapers go up in his hometown while the most beautiful historic buildings fall, lie abandoned or are demolished.

“This is all done with the complete complicity of the municipality officials who as we always hear in the press are engaged in hugely corrupt business and administrative practices. At the same time, Jerusalem - eternal capital of the Jewish people has become the single poorest city in Israel - in spite of all the donations from the Diaspora. How can that be?! Weren’t we here to build something beautiful - Earthly Jerusalem to match the beauty of its Heavenly counterpart? This is the perspective from which Yoram approaches his art, and indeed his life.”

The Shodedei Yam Gallery is located at Rehov ha-Horev 12 in Machane Yehuda. For more information call 052 240 0287.

Jeru$alem, by Yoram Amir

he building at the Holyland is the Temple
Calatrava Bridge is the Gate of Victory
A digital clock and synthetic grass
This is the main spine
Mountains disappearing forests shrinking
Historic buildings destroyed
Long live the tractor, long live the crane
There is none other but the dollar
Jerusalem is buying blue and white sponsored by Coca-Cola
Businesses are collapsing the shopping malls are enjoying
The architecture faculty in the Clal Building
The architect of the University up on Mount Scopus
He wins the Israel Prize
Tens of teachers of visual communications from Tel Aviv
Tens of scrapers of the heavens in West Jerusalem
Have to plan, to design, to advertise, to market
New York is here, Bezalel is there.
Collection of seconds.

FlickrIsrael

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