Hope springs eternal: The eighth annual Outline Festival sheds light on some dark corners

By The Jerusalem Post (World News) | Created at 2025-01-04 12:45:07 | Updated at 2025-01-06 13:39:05 2 days ago

By BARRY DAVIS JANUARY 4, 2025 14:35

Instrumental music and the plastic creative domains have an advantage of sorts over other art forms in that they don’t involve the spoken or written word.

Not that there is anything deficient or undesirable about literary offerings. But the thing about words is they can come with baggage, cultural or personal, not to mention official definitions. That is liable to place constraints on the end user’s perception of the bottom line.

Then again, there is the Outline Festival, now taking place at various locations around Jerusalem for the eighth time (through January 23), with the ongoing support of the Jerusalem Municipality.

The principal artistic premise of the event is the illustrative side of the visual realm, exhibited in 15 sites around town, in addition to a slew of workshops, guided tours, master classes, live music, and animation screenings. This interdisciplinary pairing has been at the core of the festival since the off, with the participating artists’ remit incorporating the illustration-word interface as a core objective.

This year’s cross-city itinerary follows that mindset, with current artistic director Lital Marcus Morin ensuring that the visual and the written share the spotlight in equal parts. You can catch that, for example, at the Beita Art and Design Center gallery on Jaffa Road, where the “Don’t Wait For This Flower” postcard series spells out a sobering message. The show opened for business on November 25, the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

'A Place to Lay My Head Down' by Hadas Hayun. (credit: BARRY DAVIS)

The United Nations’ website tells a sorry litany of abuse, citing the hardly credibly blood-curdling statistic that one woman is murdered, somewhere around the globe, every 10 minutes. It notes that the gender-based killings take place in disparate settings, including domestic surroundings and the workplace, and that the situation has been “exacerbated by conflicts and climate change.” The UN suggests that the robust responses are the order of the day, inter alia holding the perpetrators accountable.

OUTLINE EMBRACES the artistic tack. The principal component of the Beita exhibition is called “Between the Masks” and takes in a couple of dozen or so miniature crafted faces conveying a broad spectrum of emotional states.“It is based on conversations I had with five women who managed to break out of cycles of violence,” Marcus Morin explains.

That sounds like a trying exercise for the curator, but she says it turned out to be a rewarding experience for all concerned. “They each had a slightly different story to tell, and I came out of the interviews feeling so energized and optimistic.”

Not that it was exactly all love and light.

“There were some very tough stories, and I had some sleepless nights after hearing them. But I am very proud of these women.” The curator allows herself a gentle pat on the back, too. “I am also proud of myself,” she chuckles. “These were hard stories to listen to.”

The results of those trying exchanges are rolled out at Beita, with the diminutive painted ceramic visages resonating with the emotional roller coasters the women endured.

The exhibits, created by Lena Guberman, Erez Gavish, and Osi Wald, consummately impart the feelings and minefields the women had to negotiate in order to survive in very real and basic corporeal terms.Marcus Morin believes there is a life-affirming cathartic continuum in there.

“The works on display represent the women’s range of emotions, from the moment the violence began, revealing the various stages of coping, alongside the moments of self-discovery and a new beginning,” she writes in the exhibition notes. Encouraging words, indeed.

There are also a couple of video works in the gallery spread, which hit the relationship morass nail right on the head. One reads: “I am not your friend. I am your husband. You belong to me. You are nothing without me.”

Besides the revolting chattel sentiment, the operative word here is “husband,” or “baal” in Hebrew, which also translates as “owner.” That has always struck me as an odd, if not downright off-putting, term to use. Meanwhile, “wife” in Hebrew is “isha,” which also means “woman,” plain and simple. Perhaps there is a root cultural-linguistic issue which needs to be addressed here – one for the Academy of the Hebrew Language to examine.

‘The unknown’

Each year’s festival has a theme to the program. This time it is “the unknown.” This, we are told, references the domain in which the imagination breaks through the boundaries of reality, betwixt uncertainty and potential, where anything can happen.

“This year, we have encountered the full force of the unknown,” the festival credo notes, “whereby the fate of the hostages in Gaza and the continuing war resonate in our daily lives, cultural and artistic pursuits, and pervade the artworks [in the festival].”

Art often comes in handy, not only in providing a safe harbor from the hazards and trials of our quotidian progression but also in encapsulating our thoughts and feelings. As its stated purview covers both the visual and literary, Outline does a good job with that.

‘A Place to Lay My Head Down’

A couple of hops and skips down the road from Beita, along Jaffa Road, you get to the Black Box outdoor display facility in front of the Clal Building. The palliative quality of Hadas Hayun’s exhibition is patently conveyed in the title – “A Place to Lay My Head Down.”

Before they unveil the fruits of their labors to the world, artists are generally very much cocooned in the cloistered intimacy of their own studios. Even if they go about their creative business outdoors, they have to be focused on the job in hand and on the dialogue between the external objects and stimuli and how they filter through their inner thoughts and feelings.

Hayun’s 10-piece spread, displayed on either side of the five generously proportioned light boxes, comprises enlarged scans of images she recorded in her sketchbook over the past year. It is a mostly cheery-looking polychromic affair, with instantly recognizable symbols and shapes dovetailing with abstract slots.

Closer inspection subsequently reveals subtexts that meander through mundane tracts and into the realms of fantasy. You may catch, for example, a rectangular item in, say, a large patchwork creation which at first looks like a freely flowing amorphous vignette. Then you catch the shape of a bird, wings spread, clearly making its way across the sky with nary a perceivable worry. The “I’ll Follow You” caption that goes with it only adds to the uplifting feel.

“The artworks express a search for meaning and consolation through the act of art-making,” say curators Orna Granot and the Black Box folk. They go on to express their appreciation of Hayun’s offer to “peek into her internal world” and “stroll through mental spaces for a few moments, to conduct a non-verbal conversation of contemplation and quiet – an unspoken dialogue between artist and viewer held in the language of symbols, colors, and imagination.”

The works are replete with the latter, and the curators suggest that “art has the potential to be a refuge, as well as a bridge to the imagination.” By virtue of its physical scale, the exhibition certainly invites one to get up close and almost physically take a tiptoe through the artist’s delightfully multicolored musings.

“This is an experience that blurs the boundaries between [the] personal and [the] collective, beckoning to us to leave our thoughts outside and allow room for something new to enter,” the curators add.

At the al fresco display spot on Jaffa Road, I spied numerous passersby taking a few moments out of their individual hustle and bustle to imbibe some of Hayun’s deftly portrayed ruminations before resuming their rat race stride with some beneficial added value and food for thought.

OVER AT the far end of the city’s main artery, down at Safra Square, the municipality’s expansive frontispiece, there is a reprise to the Beita postcard set.

The full-blown “Don’t Wait For This Flower” layout with large posters lines both sides of the piazza. One, with a lolling daffodil, bears the incisive observation that “Flowers and gifts cannot conceal violence.” Another cautions: “Don’t wait for this flower. Don’t stay in a dangerous relationship.” The nether strip of the poster, thoughtfully, features the municipality hotline number and the number to call at the Na’amat women’s organization “for women in transitional situations and crisis.”

‘Architect’

Across the road, in the cozy confines of the Hutzot gallery, we step into a dream world where Yaron Steinberg has put together what looks something akin to the result of a wild weekend or two. The “Architect” exhibition, also curated by Marcus Morin, features hodgepodge models in display boxes that seem to be the upshot of a mind encamped in an alternative parallel universe or, perhaps, what someone came up with after emerging from a bender. However, it seems that none of the above applies.

Steinberg’s granddad Yehuda relocated to Jerusalem from Beit She’an in 1923 – to get away from the Arab pogroms of the time – where he devised a model of his dream house in Jerusalem. He clearly did a good job with it, as it earned him a scholarship to attend the Alliance school near the Mahaneh Yehuda market, which offered religious and high-quality vocational education.

In “Architect,” Yaron delves into the whys and wherefores of his illustrious forebear’s youthful project – Grandpa Yehuda subsequently became quite a mover and shaker on the Jerusalem architectural scene back in his day – and traces the capital’s checkered timeline, looking at its upheavals, as well as interfaces between the past, present, and future. The seemingly jumbled affairs on show serve as a microcosm of that storied evolution, providing a nod to the artist’s grandfather and to the notion that you need to know from whence you come to get some idea of how to plot the way forward.

Other exhibitions to look out for include the tellingly entitled “Far from Certain” collection of animation works, projected on the Generali Building on the corner of Jaffa Road and Shlomzion Hamalka Street; and acclaimed caricaturist, comics artist, animator, and illustrator Noam Nadav’s entertaining “Living Beyond the Line” spread at the old Shaare Zedek building.

Meanwhile, if you want a glimpse at the future of local illustration, drop by the Bu’ah (Bubble) building at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, right next to Safra Square, where second- to fourth-year students from the Department of Visual Communication proffer their own fun, wild, and whacky ideas of “the unknown,” under the curatorial aegis of Idan Vaknin and Amit Trainin.

For more information: outlinejerusalem.com/exhibitions/?lang=en