Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together.
(Psalm 122:2-3)
When thou goest to the house of God, be more ready to hear, than to give the sacrifice.
(Ecclesiastes 5:1)
“I fell in love with this city at once, but…” followed by an awkward pause. This often happens to people when they come to Jerusalem for the first time. For me, it was not love at first sight, nor at second. Whatever came, came later, and it was not love, but something different, more acute and less defined. I am not even sure the word “love” applies to this place; at least not in the usual, elevated sense of this word. Something other than love is here. Not everyone has the good fortune to experience this strange feeling of otherness, but if you are lucky enough… Even though “luck” is also not quite the word; words are of little use when speaking of this city. Nor is it a city at all. Rather, it is a hopelessly tangled knot of human passions. Or, maybe, their reflection in a mirror. Or else the umbilical cord that connects that which is here to that which is not here. I don’t know.
This city grows on everybody differently. Everything depends on how one comes to it and what for. Someone, not too lucky, will simply see the noisy, winding little streets, shabby house-walls and sun-burnt stones. Another one may, having visited in a day or two all the must-see landmarks, tick off the “I was here” box, and will run on. Someone else will enter this city absolutely certain that he is the only one to know the truth. He will walk with his head high, noticing nobody around him. In all likelihood, he will have no luck either. Jerusalem is not the place to enter in this way. This is not the place to move from point to point, from dome to dome, taking the shortest route and cutting corners. There are no straight routes or shortcuts here at all…
This exhibition is an attempt to pause and try to make sense of what you might pass in the street without noticing. To look into the eyes of the people whom you meet by chance, for a brief moment. To hear the silence of an oriental bazaar. To capture that point where religion stops and faith begins. It is an attempt to sense the City that is much more than just a city. But in no way is it an attempt to halt the fleeting moment. A moment cannot be halted at all; it is for you to pause and try to quietly take in this elusive moment.
