Amid COVID-19, Tel Aviv's Tmuna Theater opens virtual museum

• Published date: 29 December 2020
• Date: 29 December 2020
• Author: BARRY DAVIS
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

As the first lockdown took hold and it became clear this was no overnighter, museums and other purveyors of the arts began to dip into the domain of virtual presentation to keep the public on board and aware of what they had to offer. Zoom, You Tube, Facebook and practically any Internet-based platform available has become the de rigueur way to go.

Now the Tmuna Theater venue in Tel Aviv, a popular outlet for mainstream and left field-leaning theatrical and musical ventures in pre-corona times, has decided to take matters a step further by establishing a brand new virtual museum, naturally enough called the Tmuna Museum.

The curtain raiser is an exhibition titled "Events Horizon" that is due to open on the last day of this troubled calendar year. Nitzan Cohen, who co-curated the show alongside Erez Maayan Shalev, and has accumulated a pretty impressive bio as a theater producer over the years, feels the show moniker has pandemic-pertinent undertones. Event horizon, a term taken from astrophysics, relates to the edge of a black hole in outer space beyond which nothing is visible.

"Even in normal times there are all sorts of things going on in the country that we would prefer to turn a blind to," says Cohen. "Now, with the coronavirus and all that, it is easier for the government to hide even more things they get up to."

With that curatorial mindset in place, one may assume that "Events Horizon" is not exactly oriented toward the Disneyland end of the entertainment-cultural spectrum. One work in the new exhibition conveys that dark undercurrent in concise fashion. The "El-Arakib Struggle Museum" installation, created by Cohen, Einat Weizman and Aziz Alturi, tells the continuing sorry tale of the eponymous Bedouin village, located 10 km. north of Beersheba, which incredibly has been destroyed by the state over 100 times. The village, which was established before the creation of the state, was evacuated by the IDF in 1951. The land was expropriated and subsequently leased to the Israel Land Administration. Ongoing protests and legal proceedings have yet to reestablish it.

"The work presents our culture, the culture of repression, against the struggle of El-Arakib," Cohen explains. "The museum directs the spotlight to us, to the actions taken in our name, and to the ways in which the inhabitants of El-Arakib respond."

To date the village has been demolished in excess of 100 times, and has become a symbol of the unrecognized Bedouin settlements across the Negev...