Museum on the Seam

Located in a former checkpoint house between the Israeli and Jordanese parts of divided Jerusalem, scared from gunfires from several assult, this museum now raises questions about socio-political reality and the various civil rights. It's not big, we went through it in a couple of ours, and some of the "art" is only art because it's in a museum. But it also had some nice pieces, that made me think. First of all that I still don't know the local history well enough. And I didn't know the razor-wire was invented in South Africa (an artist from SA had bended razor-wire into frames).


I liked the very expressive and composed photographies by Claudia Rogge - e.g. one with people in black robes, had they been white were it Ku Klux Klan, one holding a big silver cross supported on the ground - and the "invisible Man" photo bu Liu Bolin, apparently he's made many more, very impressive photographs. (Here's an article about him with many pictures.)


The best Israeli piece was a short movie by Doron Solomons (and normally I don't like movies in museums, I think they are too wierd), called "Blood brothers" in Hebrew and "Brothers in arms" in English. A repeating scene called "Brotherly love" was the artist as a siametic twin, doing worse and worse things to his other half - I interpreted it as Israelis and Palestinians who fight over this piece of land - ending with something like "maybe I can't control my own body, but he's not going to control it!" and the own siametic twin shooting the other in the head. And maybe dying also, because they share the same body, the same vital organs?