2014
Note 2
Steve: ever restless, born 1975 in Jerusalem. grew up in this city with its long-lasting conflict between Israel and the Palestinian claim to human justice. It is not the spectacular events that increasingly nag at him. It is the small, slow creep of things, the infringement of laws, the subtle abnormalities that give him the feeling of something profoundly wrong.When he lives in his native city, he feels a lack of homeland, uprooted. homeless. this feeling grows into a mounting affliction that corrodes, that unsettles one’s natural basic trust, long-term. At the age of 33 he goes to london. Although he could continue to live in Jerusalem, he can do so no longer in a place where constant restrictions mark everyday life.the long time existence of the “real” Jerusalem becomes a memory, over- laid by the new sensual impressions and living conditions of london and later Berlin. Jerusalem as a physical place gets modified in Steve’s consciousness to a Jerusalem that exists in the form of an image in the imagination. «Jerusalem - he tells me - became an image and I felt entrapped in it. It refers to Jerusalem, of course. But slowly and after realizing that Jerusalem is an image, I understood that my struggle was to understand images, their function and origin in order to find a way to liberate myself. I did liberate myself from exile, or the image of exile, by resorting to my imagination. how- ever, I soon realized that I became entrapped in other images. hence, life itself becomes an endless process of liberation.We need to find all those systems that occupy our thoughts or imaginations so that we can think and imagine in our own way».
exile becomes an ever recurring theme for Steve, in the end “global citizenship” is the only viable alternative. his time outside the walls of Jerusalem turns into a phase of coping with ex- ile and all its symptoms and side effects. this initiates a process of self-questioning and introspection. And it becomes a process that liberates him from the traumata of his origin. «I understood that everything around us is a construct, a system whose codes go unquestioned by the majority of people - he says in an interview - by chance I grew up in a region known for its difficult codes. My struggle was to break free from that system, which by default, labelled me as a person under Israeli occupation. I asked myself what was stopping me from feeling free?» By uncoupling himself from this system he is able to be free. And he is helped to do so also through his «research on the origin and function of images».
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Exhibition tour
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