Avital Geva, Meeting with Secretary General of the Histadrut Labor Federation, 1972

In 1972, together with Moshe Gershuni and Micha Ullman, Avital Geva (b. 1941) initiated a meeting with then Secretary General of the Histadrut Labor Federation Yitzhak Ben-Aharon. The documented meeting was held in early May, on a Saturday, in Kibbutz Givat Haim, and was one of a series of four or five meetings Geva held with Ben-Aharon in the course of about a year. The choice of the secretary general was not random; many considered Ben-Aharon a philosopher and prophet of the Zionist left who did not defer to the leadership’s narrow political thinking. What is the significance of an action by artists who converse with a national leader? They are not, after all, a group of citizens, involved activists, including artists, but rather a group that comes together from the field of art and from thinking about the meaning of the artistic action; a group that carries out political involvement from an artistic position. How is it even possible to imagine this kind of position that comes out of art into the field of political action for the first time in the 1970s? And what enabled art to pervade the political space in this way?

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