Photo: Yael Schmidt

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Heritage Protection and the Common Good
September 2022 – January 2023

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Susanne Mariacher, Daniel Tchetchik, Zipa Kempinsky, Omer Krieger, Shir Raz, and Elena Stelzer

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Is conservation a blessing or a curse? Who has the right to the White City? What happened to Tel Aviv-Yafo? How are urban myths created? How can we rethink air rights? To which extent does the White City as a public space allow civic action?

 

During the four months between September 2022 and January 2023, the residency participants explored the topic of heritage protection and the common good: between public and private interests. The residents examined the conflicts and questions generated by UNESCO's 2003 designation of Tel Aviv-Yafo's White City as a World Heritage Site and the challenges this declaration produced two decades later. 

 

The Liebling Haus residency program aims to encourage and promote collaborative exploration and action within a discursive framework centered on urban processes and developments in the city on a local and global scale.

 

The program is part of a multidisciplinary research in collaboration with the Planning Policy Lab at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (academic advisors Prof. Nir Mualam and Dr. Eynat Mendelson Shwartz). The research examines challenges and conflicts emerging from heritage protection policies, with a focus on sites declared as world heritage sites by UNESCO. Concentrating on Tel Aviv-Yafo's White City, the research investigates what tensions occur in World Heritage Sites and how (and whether) heritage related policies exacerbate or moderate them. 

     

On 15 June 2023 an exhibition at Liebling Haus will present works pertaining to topics raised during the residency program. 

 

Collaborators at the Technion's Planning Policy Lab: Prof. Nir Mualam and Dr. Eynat Mendelson Shwartz

Artistic director and curator: Architect Sabrina Cegla

Assistant curator: Dana Gutman

 

Supported by the Austrian Cultural Forum Tel Aviv, the Austrian Embassy

 

Residency participants

 

Susanne Mariacher works within the realm of social design, participatory art, and architecture. Her work challenges what architectural heritage and public space within their sociopolitical contexts potentially can be. She collaborates with other individuals and collectives to realize interventions, performances, and socially engaged artistic projects and has been commissioned to contribute works to the Vienna Design Week, the Festival of Regions and Art in Public Space Vienna (KÖR). As a member of the architecture collective AKT, together with Hermann Czech, she was recently selected to design and curate the Austrian contribution to the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023.

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Daniel Tchetchik is a staff photographer and chief editor of the photography blog at Haaretz newspaper. In his personal work, Tchetchik examines his surroundings through a photographic practice that seeks visual expressions of emotion embedded in the landscape and the people he sees around him. His works are displayed both as photographic series and as artist books. The various platforms on which he is active allow him to present different, changing narratives with the same photographs. Tchetchik often works with film that has been exposed to light and kept in harmful conditions to emphasize the material properties of the photographic medium and of the subjects of his works. 

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Zipa Kempinsky, a former journalist (Hadashot, HaIr, Maariv), is an editor and journalism editing guide, lecturer, and creator. Over the past decade, Kempinsky has been observing and documenting the small and large changes in Tel Aviv-Yafo's Florentine neighborhood. Her daily wanderings and gathering of (mostly visual) information feed her preoccupation with urban street culture. Kempinsky has mounted solo exhibitions in the alternative galleries Halalit, Meshuna, and Habeit HaAdom, and participated in group exhibitions, including at the Nahum Gutman Museum and the Haifa Museum of Art. Her blog Street View on Florentine appeared for several years on Ynet's Xnet platform. 

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Omer Krieger is a transdisciplinary artist who creates actions, performances and video works and curates exhibitions and events in the public space. Krieger is interested in the relations between art, citizenship, and action, and merges performative actions, social situations, types of public gatherings, and civic choreographies in local and international contexts. Krieger was co-founder and leader of the research and action body Public Movement (2006-11); artistic director of the Under the Mountain festival for new public art (2011-15), and artistic director and co-founder of 1:1 – Center for Art and Politics in Tel Aviv (2018-20). His large-scale performance Eviction premiered at the 2022 Israel Festival in Jerusalem.

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Shir Raz is a multidisciplinary artist whose works pose questions about how we attach meaning to a given place, and how it relates to its historical context. These questions are formulated through installations that combine traditional artistic techniques with contemporary mechanisms, archival materials and 3D printing, which link the historic and the futuristic. Her works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Israel and abroad, including the Saatchi Gallery, the Royal Academy and Tate Modern in London, and the Hastings Museum in East Sussex. Raz is the recipient of the 2022 Israel Ministry of Culture Prize for a Young Artist, Education Scholarship from the Royal College of Art and the Bezalel Academy Prize for Excellency in Photography. Raz has participated in the residency programs Arad Art and Architecture (2018), Bidud Residency (2020), Cabri Gallery (2021), and Kibbutzim College (2021). 

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Elena Stelzer is a German-born Israeli Conceptual artist whose work critiques social and political systems, especially those of the art world. She is best known for her large-scale site-specific artworks which are associated with Institutional Critique, taking the form of temporary architectural alterations and interventions. She often uses institutions both as subject matter and as venue, which has at times caused controversy – as seen in her BFA graduation work Harpoon 12 at the Shenkar College of Multidisciplinary Art, a work that was invited to be exhibited in the framework of the Triennial of Modernism in Berlin (2019). In Stelzer's most recent work SUBMISSION (2022), she precisely calculates the amount of tension the building of the Bezalel academy can undergo before reaching its breaking point. She completed two master’s degrees – one in German Philology and Philosophy at the University of Vienna, and the other in Fine Arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (2022). Stelzer is the recipient of the Shenkar Arts Encouragement Award (2019) and recipient of the Excellence Grant from the Daniel Arison Foundation (2019).