Art for hope’s sake: the Manofim Jerusalem Contemporary Art Festival

The 16th edition of what can now be said to be the country’s preeminent contemporary art event will take place in Jerusalem on July 9-13, with the support of the Jerusalem Foundation’s Innovation Fund, as well as the Culture and Sport Ministry, and the Jerusalem Municipality. This time round, co-founder and artistic director Rinat Edelstein, who conceived the festival along with Lee He Shulov – both Jerusalem-based artists themselves – has laid on a rich and expansive program for the five days.

Manofim has always been very much a community-based and citywide affair, and this year’s roster incorporates events at more than 30 galleries and cultural centers, with hundreds of independent artists from all sorts of creative walks of life on board.

The inclusive ethos is also reflected in the choice of the roof of the Art Cube Artists’ Studio industrial building in Talpiot – the festival’s pulsating heart – as the venue for a string of entertaining shows and other activities. For starters, there are oceans of room there, but it also offers a panoramic view of large tracts of the city, from nearby Beit Safafa, across the Katamonim, King David Street, and as far as leafy Rehavia. That instantly conveys a sense of one’s bearings – geographically, ethnically, socially, and culturally.

Considering the festival’s moniker, that suits nicely. Manofim means “cranes.” When the festival began life in 2008, there was plenty of construction work in progress around Talpiot. There was also some wordplay in there. As Edelstein notes, with a bit of verbal jiggling manofim becomes Ma hanofim? which translates as “What are the views/vistas?”

Believe

Of course, some restorative fare would not go amiss these days. While Edelstein says she is not looking to put any psychologists, social workers, or alternative therapy practitioners out of work, she is not oblivious to the curative gains to be gleaned from viewing exciting, emotive, evocative, and well-crafted exhibits and shows. “I think that each and every performance and event in this year’s festival has the desire to do that, to bring people together in the same place, to experience something together, to have an uplifting artistic experience,” she declares.

That was always there, lurking behind the curatorial intent. “We wanted to generate those moments of the things that we need so very much these days,” she says. “I think we are now at a time when the spirit is so absent. Everything is so ‘correct’, and even violent. Maybe that has been the case for some time, but it has been given another boost.”

Achieving a healthier state of mind and emotion generally involves a degree of acceptance, of recognizing that if some people are different from us and have a different understanding of “the truth,” that doesn’t mean they are wrong or that we are superior to them. As we have sadly seen countless times in this part of the world, that can feed into political-religious lines of thought, which makes the decision to hold the festival’s curtain raiser centerpiece at Mount Zion an inspired curatorial choice.

In her festival catalogue preamble, Edelstein refers to the relative anonymity of the location and says it is “a kind of backyard which most tourists pass by on their way to the major sacred sites [in the Old City].” She notes that the spot is unique in that it contains places that are holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and “sit side by side.”

Therein lies the crux of the festival theme – peace and harmony between peoples of different faiths, and takes on life around them. “Over the centuries, Mount Zion has acquired its fame mainly thanks to a special building located in the heart of it, which was also the starting point for the exhibition: the compound of David’s Tomb; Nabi Doud [the burial place of the prophet David according to the Islamic faith]; and the Cenacle, which is traditionally believed to be where the Last Supper took place.”

Edelstein and her colleagues in curatorial endeavor have pulled out all the stops for the opening event which, first and foremost, features the main exhibition of the whole Manofim shebang. The show, which will be open daily throughout the festival, will be spread across several buildings, including the magnificent Dormition Abbey near Zion Gate, as well as spots – public buildings and private homes – on Mount Zion and its environs.

Messages with foresight

“The exhibition will oscillate between questions dealing with religion, territory, justice, and culture, and address faith not only through the religious significance of the word but also as a catalyst that is at the heart of every person, such that [it] links narrative to space, endowing the imagined territory with real volume that materializes in our lives, as well as on the land,” says Edelstein.

“The exhibition is enabled through cooperation between the Jerusalem Intercultural Center, the inhabitants of the mountain, its institutions, artists from Jerusalem and beyond it, and Israelis and Palestinians of different faiths and beliefs,” she adds.

Amazingly, and a little chillingly, much of the artist roster was compiled prior to Oct. 7. This edition of Manofim was due to take place in late October 2023, and much of Edelstein’s observations and musings in the festival catalogue was written in September last year. Those messages are now even more pertinent and poignant.

Music, dance, culture

Bernstein, like Edelstein, was keen not only to provide quality entertainment and alluring aesthetics. He was also looking to offer added emotive, inspiring, and thought-provoking value. “I thought: ‘Let’s not just aim to achieve answers [to pressing issues]. Let’s not try to get to a clear, defined end result, like healing.’”

He feels there is a process to be traversed, and it isn’t necessarily all fun and games. “If you want to heal something, say a wound, sometimes you have to extract pus, you have to exert pressure on it and cause pain. It is not just about covering something up and putting on bandages. That applies to medical care, but also any process can bring out poisons.”

Bernstein is not, he hastens to add, looking to give the Manofim audiences a hard time. “In my curatorial approach, I was guided by the idea of raising issues and questions. First and foremost, all the shows set out to connect with the audiences from a variety of angles,” Bernstein explains. “They may not be overly direct; you can relate to the shows in your way.”

As any artist surely knows, regardless of the creative intent, when the public encounters the finished item, they will bring their own baggage and understanding to the communication fray. “You can come to the shows to enjoy some escapism or to get some comfort. That happens, and it should happen, since Oct. 7. That is one of the roles of art and music.”

THERE IS more on offer. “There is something I believe is more important about art – to think and reflect, to connect and, in fact, to be together in a place where people experience the same things in different ways. You might have a sense of harmony with one person, and what you feel and think may clash with what someone else is getting from an event. That can help us, possibly, to unload something, gain some release.”

That would, indeed, be a fine thing, and there is a plethora of multifarious entertainment items across the five-day program – under The Mixer umbrella and at other junctures of the festival – that looks set to cater to all kinds of tastes, and even emotional needs. The opening event on July 9 begins with a guided tour of the exhibition, followed by a performance by the Great Gehenna Choir a cappella troupe.

The Mixer program kicks in, in adventurous style, on July 11 (doors open at 8:30 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m.) on the rooftop of the Art Cube Artists’ Studio. The eight-piece ensemble, headed by drummer Dov Balu Rosen, goes by the name of Blind Orchestra. The restricted vision epithet refers to the way Rosen and his merry band of willing cohorts – including singer-songwriter Yael Deckelbaum; incendiary reedman Eyal Talmudi; and drummer, vocalist and spoken-word artist Alon Neuman – will go about piecing together the Devotion show. Improvisation is the definitive name of the game as Rosen directs his charges about the next unexpected step to take and the artists take off on some unforeseen tangent.

MORE UNBRIDLED frontier-pushing stuff will be offered at the same venue on the morrow when a triad of songwriters – vocalist Ella Ronen, pianist-singer Ruth Dolores Weiss, and bassist-vocalist Yehu Yaron – get together for a session of sonic extemporization that could go every and any which way. Here, too, the idea is to achieve some degree of inner peace and basic equanimity by just going with the flow and seeing how things work out.

The Mixer program closes on the Talpiot rooftop on July 13 when internationally acclaimed jazz trio Shalosh joins forces with stellar cellist-vocalist Maya Belsitzman, vocalists Daniella Turgeman and Tula Ben Ari, and rapper Rebel Sun for a freewheeling attack on Pictures at an Exhibition, written by Russian Romantic era composer Modest Mussorgsky.

As the Shalosh gang – pianist Gadi Stern, bassist David Michaeli, and drummer Matan Assayag – put it: “During the concert, we will move between the realm of abstract improvisation and songs which were chosen specially for its decoration, and which will try to guide us through the exhibition in our pulsating imagination.”

That goes for much of the imaginative program – which includes events for children and families – put together by Edelstein and her comrades in inventive and spiritually nourishing arms in what promises to be an entertaining and life-affirming Manofim experience for all.■

For tickets and more information: manofim.org