Prologue / Udi Edelman

Translated by: Lital Levin
Image: “Palestine: A Realistic Film”, Tali Keren

The discipline of history had undergone radical and intensive changes in the second half of the twentieth century. Splitting and diverging, it spread over a variety of research methods and new research subjects. Structuralism and the linguistic turn unsettled explicit and hidden assumptions about the writing of history, rendering it in many ways impossible to write history as the total and absolute logic behind a series of events.

This rupture has given rise to a plethora of debates and insights, expanding well beyond the limits of history departments. The ever-growing influence it exerts in recent decades on art and its modes of action forms the subject at the center of the exhibition Histories.

This current issue of Maarav offers a critical discussion of historiography alongside artistic interventions in history: Noam Yuran proposes a return to a total narrative of human history and to questions on history’s nature by contemplating the emergence of terms and concepts; Nicolas Bourriaud outlines the transforming conception of time in contemporary art and art’s various gestures toward time and history, and Ofri Ilany describes the place of the Jew in the genesis of history writing. The issue also includes two historic-artistic archival items: an excerpt from the testimony of partisan and poet Ada Mavet that unfolds her eventful life story, and a newspaper interview on the refugees of “Exodus 2048”, presenting a future history for the Jewish and middle-eastern reality.

Issue no. 15 of Maarav on “History and Historiograpy” is accompanied by the exhibition “Histories”. The exhibition is on view at The Israeli Center for Digital Art from 5 October 2013 to 25 January 2014.

Editor and curator: Udi Edelman

 

 

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