Institute of Contemporary Arts

Right in Jerusalem

Date: 18 March 2007

Sightseeing in Jerusalem is heavy-duty. The sites are just brimming with biblical significance, you can't get in anywhere without going through a metal detector and past the scowl of a heavily-armed soldier. And if you exit a 'Jewish' site in a 'Muslim' area, you're likely to get your own armed guards to escort you down the street. Such a hotbed of tension and uneasy coexistence is the last place you'd expect to find a small and friendly contemporary art gallery, right?

Wrong. The Museum on The Seam sits right on the old Green Line between West Jerusalem and East Jerusalem, and indeed used to be an Israeli military outpost (the gun emplacements have been preserved in its makeover and you can look out through the narrow slits to the street below). Under the directorship and curation of Raphie Etgar, since 1999 it's been a socio-political museum dedicated to promoting co-existence through art. There's a buzzer on the door, but no armed guards. But you'd expect it to have a locally-oriented exhibition looking at issues related to Jerusalem, yes?

Wrong again. The current exhibition 'Equal and Less Equal' is an international exhibition about work, featuring the large-format photography of Andreas Gursky and Sebastiao Salgado, and moving image from Martha Rossler and William Kentridge. The exhibition takes in work in all aspects from the industrial destruction and effacement of men to the degradation and resistance of women in both domestic and sex work. Dana Levy's 'After the End' combines a triptych of oil wells slowly pumping with the sound of church bells as if to show all that makes the world go round, and in Marie Jose Burkie's tryptypch 'Exposure: Dawn I, II, II' shadowy prostitutes, their faces obscured, shift uneasily in the windows of a red light district As punters pass in front of the video cameras you flinch as if they were in the gallery with you.

Even as someone who works in a gallery, you wouldn't expect to find similar issues in arts marketing to those that affect you in London, would you? Wrong a third time. Downstairs, I find Raphie in full flow, talking to a group of architecture students, describing the building, its history and current purpose. Stuck between the ultra-conservative Jewish neighbourhood of Me'a She'arim (for whom visiting museums is strictly off the agenda) and Palestinian East Jerusalem across the road, the Museum has large audiences, but few of them local. But you can imagine that here it's a little more difficult than deciding where to distribute your flyers.

You can be wrong about a lot of things in Jerusalem. The Museum on the Seam is one of the things that's just right.