Nevo

A public commission for the Knesset, Jerusalem

Archival pigment print, framed, 125*305 cm

Curated by Sharon Soffer

February 2024

 

To stand on Mount Nevo (Nebo in Hebrew) means to look with longing toward what cannot be attained. Nevo marks a wish, a hope, a promise not yet fulfilled, and also a boundary. The landscape in the work echoes the topography of the slopes of the Judean Desert and the cliffs of the Dead Sea fault escarpment, descending toward the Dead Sea. In the background, the mountains of Jordan and Mount Nevo appear. The point of view here is reversed from that of the biblical Moses. It looks from within the unattainable place toward the historical lookout point, the site of the missed opportunity.

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The cliffs and the horizon line are all made from photographs of archaeological vessels excavated in the land. These are hollow remnants that came into contact with the everyday lives of people who once lived here. They are dated to different periods and together form a material weave that is not associated with one group or another, but belongs to the place itself.

The Judean Desert was a birthplace of new movements. In the past, communities fled to the caves of Qumran to establish an alternative to centralized rule, a kind of retreat into the desert as a political vipassana, a space from which reality could be viewed from a distance and with clarity. To this day, the monks of the Mar Saba Monastery on the cliffs of the Kidron Valley continue this tradition of place. Isolated in the heart of the desert, they are immersed in devotion to God and moral discipline. The desert allows purification.

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Nevo is installed in the passageway connecting the Speaker of the Knesset’s office and the plenary hall. Next to the ceramic work of the artist Chava Kaufman and opposite the cafeteria, the vessels that compose it appear as digested matter of history, like leftovers of a meal, peels of time.

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On Mount Nevo a promise was given. It may be fulfilled and it may not. The establishment of the state of Israel, and within it the house of the parliament, is a movement along the axis of history meant to realize that biblical promise of a flourishing co-existence in the land, with an awareness of the conditions it demands. The backward gaze, toward Mount Nevo, is an act of reconstruction, an attempt to recall and the original, founding point of view.

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Text by the artist