overlapping voices – israeli and palestinian artists

… Do the Right Thing

the point of spike lee’s pun, of course, is the fact that it would indeed be good to do the right thing in a labyrinthine situation. But unfortunately, no one tells you what that is. and the suspicion quik- kly arises that the right thing is already something else at the moment when you do it.

From here

Being from austria, we were interested in israel al- ways with a clear reference to our own history. it was coming from the latter, and it had always been that way, that we spoke; it was coming from the latter that we went to israel and not to chile or ti- bet or Beirut – equally good places for difficult pro- jects – nor, initially, to Ramallah.

we always spoke of the close entanglement between viennese and israeli history, by which we meant the history of viennese anti-semitism and, not only but ultimately also, the history of the shoah – of the annihilation and expulsion of the austrian and european Jewry. and we were thin- king of the figure of theodor herzl, the successful prophet and creator of a state, of the history of po- litical Zionism associated with him and tied in with his anti-semitic viennese milieu; Zionism, the an- swer or one of the possible answers to this anti-semitism.

Simple complexities, quickly told

half a year ago, we could still couch our intention in the simple terms we used again and again in our project descriptions: we wanted to present a more complex picture of what is here perceived simply as the “conflict in the middle east” and subsumed under this title. in this country, middle east experts who often do not even live there explain this conflict. at the beginning of the project, our mission was clearly to render at least this one simplification less clear. it was and still is our wish to call for greater respect for the complexity and intricacy of the situation. All our efforts were based on the idea that we would, as far as possible, let all voices speak for themselves, even when or precisely when their message does not conform to the mainstream or is hard to understand in our context. This presupposes the ability to bear contradictions. This desire is also reflected by some of the contributions to the catalogue.

Yet there is one voice we almost entirely silenced in this confusion once we engaged in dialogue with our Israeli and Palestinian partners: our own voice; the voice of the European, the Austrian position, one that is of no small importance in this configuration. Even though we may not identify with this our history and society (as our partners frequently do not identify with theirs either), we are a part and product of the place from which we speak or, over the course of the project, more and more often remained silent. To keep silent about one’s own interests and desires, however, becomes problematic as we request that others express theirs. The temptation is only too great to deduce from this silence a status of objectivity, and hence a sense of (European-colonialist) superiority. It is very comfortable, after all, to be obliged primarily to listen and not to “show one’s colours”.

Language found again

Every time we returned, our luggage and heads full with new stories, new knowledge, and new experiences, to Austria and its only too familiar loquacity, the silence we had practiced in Israel seemed to us to be exactly the right thing. We had learned from our partners simply to listen to them without wanting to know better.
We came to understand a previously unfamiliar radical respect for a great variety of taboos, limitations, and vulnerabilities on the part of those we encountered. And this experience gave us the certainty that we had become wiser. At home, we turned experts ourselves and began to tell of that foreign land.
At issue, then, is here the familiar question of who takes the word in which context and in which name, and who will in fact also be heard.
This question arises as a matter of principle; but of course it arises with special urgency with respect to a region that is time and again made to serve as a foil for acts of political positioning within Europe. We want to write here also about how quickly and naïvely even those who don’t want to walk into the colonialist pitfall of “expertise” – simply because it flatters them (and us!). We would be incapable of understanding the structures of colonization if we overlooked how neat and pleasant it feels to privileged white Europeans to talk smartly about others while we pass over ourselves and our history in silence as though we were a blank slate.

One way or another, we didn’t do the right thing. It might well be that there is no right thing within the wrong thing. We won’t escape the post-colonialist pitfalls.

Processes of transformation

If education is the mission, then it ought to be to educate one’s own society about its own affairs. We probably liked some of the artists we met through Tal Adler so well because they presented to us projects that do exactly this, and to the fullest degree, with respect to their own society. The visitors to the present exhibition and the readers of this catalogue are similarly invited to engage in a dialogue not specifically about Israel or about Palestine but about the ways in which artists and authors, using their own means, interrogate themselves and their society. And this one important difference lies precisely here: whether they speak about their own society, and hence about themselves, and wish to change both, or whether we speak about the society of others in the unfounded and comfortable belief that none of this has anything to do with our everyday world. By “processes of transformation”, we mean here all forms of change and shifts in perspective that take place once we displace the questions of Israel and Palestine to Austria and place them in an arrangement here.
It is our hope that an immediate and less fearful engagement with the voices “from there” will in the future have effects in turn upon what is “here”. We know, of course, that those Austrians who seek to address these questions in a sensitive manner have developed anxieties and cautions about engaging artists from Israel or Palestine. These attitudes arose out of an awareness of how quickly the deeply rooted anti-Semitism in our society is called into action once the subject of Israel and Palestine comes up.
Based on this caution, one of the foundations of our work was that we did not believe that we could “simply do” it. These anxieties have their justifications. We believe that the only way to deal with them is to counter them. They are the consequence not least of an awareness of how much ignorance – or how much “not wanting to know” – there is here; and how dangerous it is.