Landscape in Continuum

INFO

I’m a photographer and digital media artist working at the intersection of architecture, archives, technology, and politics. In my works, I use 3D modeling, mapping, internet-based tools, and more to examine archival photographic materials and their relations to geographies of conflict and displacement, especially in Palestine. My practice is engaged with issues of social justice, human rights, and anti-colonialism, and their application in art and media.

Brooklyn, NY

tai.shabtai@gmail.com

The research subject in Landscape in Continuum is a portion of land that sits between Isawiya and Abu Tor in East Jerusalem; unappropriated territory at the heart of a controversy between official authorities that seek to turn it into a national park - the Jerusalem Municipality, the Nature and Parks Authority, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection - and activists, politicians, urban planners, and residents of the area who wish to prevent this plan from being realized. They claim that the alleged environmental justification for the 'Mount Scopus National Park' project in fact hinges on political agendas, which aim to limit the spreading of the surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods.

The land in question, serene and peaceful-looking, stretches down the hillside of the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, and has acquired an iconic quality since the campus's inauguration. This is also the landscape that Pinchevsky saw every day during his studies at Bezalel. He currently seeks to follow this piece of land and understand what it means to observe it, realizing that landscape is a product of perspective and cultural structuring, and not only of architectonic plans and geographical outlines. The landscape's repeated appearance in the photographs, maps and archive-based photo collages, creates a space of accumulative abundance, as a kind of gathering of evidence in attempts to decipher the significance of the place.