Architect Magazine on Dialogue on the Wall
Architect Magazine has a short piece on Form + Content’s Dialogue on the Wall exhibit. I hadn’t realized before that the exhibit’s preparation had begun with a different concept:
When Minnesota architect Jay H. Isenberg was planning the architectural installation “Dialogue on the Wall,” the Palestinian crisis loomed as a two-sided affair—Israel on one side, Palestine on the other. Isenberg conceived the show as a 10-foot tall concrete wall, and he hoped through artistic narrative, multimedia productions, and performance art (accomplished with help from his artist wife, Lynda Monick-Isenberg), to come to terms with the powerful nature of a wall as divisive force. The concept was relatively simple for representing a region so inflamed: The gallery would be split into two spaces, with the voice and story of each group on its own side.
Then a clash among Palestinians in Gaza added a third dynamic. Isenberg shifted from symmetry and the “equal presentation of views” to an asymmetrical setup in which the wall becomes a dividing line between cacophony and contemplation, regardless of one’s point of view. “Design always changes,” he says. “It becomes a collage of both sides intermingled.”
Barriers, whether built by the Chinese, dedicated to the emperor Hadrian, or considered to block illegal immigration in the American Southwest, are paradoxical, Isenberg argues. They create likable serpentine patterns. “Visually, if you pull out the political connotation, these things in the landscape are quite beautiful,” he says.
I’ll find out when I see the exhibit on Thursday if the projection of my photos on one side of the wall from three projectors is part of the “cacophony” side. That would make sense. The contemplation side sounds more comforting.
Jay’s mention of the sometimes-beautiful dividing patterns brings to mind one of my favorite Separation Wall photos, at Abu Dis, which I’ve shown here before:
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