Adam Keller in Berlin, Sept 5-8

Dear Friends

The political and non-political decorations accumulated over several decades on the walls of my modest apartment in Holon (suburb of Tel Aviv) - put up, over the years, by myself and by my late unforgettable wife Beate - have attracted the attention of the highly professional photographer Ruth Nemet (my cousin). She spent many hours going systematically over the apartment and taking many photos of the walls. The result is going to be presented in a Berlin gallery (BQ Weydingerstrasse 10, Berlin) on September 6. I felt I should be there in person. You are most welcome to attend, I think it is worthwhile. In fact, Ruth's photos look more impressive than the actual walls of my home...

My short visit to Berlin (Sept. 5 to 8) is also a very welcome opportunity to meet my son Uri (resident of Berlin for some years already) as well as my Berlin friends and contacts. I will have with me my Israeli phone (+972-54-2340749) which is supposed to be fully operative also in Germany. Anyone who cannot attend the exhibition and would still like to contact me is welcome to call.

Yours, Adam Keller - Gush Shalom

Some words about the exhibition:

Comprising a new series of photographs unfolding in space within a sequence-like arrangement, Ruth Nemet’s solo exhibition "A Ghost Returns" depicts (and displaces) segments of a veteran Israeli peace activist’s apartment located in a soon-to-be-demolished residential building outside Tel Aviv. The apartment is clogged, stuffed with books, magazines, and souvenirs. The walls and doors are covered from floor to ceiling by stickers, posters, and paper clips. An overlap of political and day-to-day memorabilia hoarded over time, the apartment amounts to a mixed archive of socially- and ideologically-engaged slogans, mundane objects, and random images. > > > The presence of the political message within the domestic-private realm points to the totality of the message, the fact that it occupies all parts of life, providing it with purpose and meaning. The exhibition title is inscribed in German above an illustration of Karl Marx embedded in one of the collages veiling the door leading from the living room to the kitchen. Reminiscent (to a certain extent) of the work of the décollagists or the aesthetics of the bulletin billboard they utilized, the sheets of visual and textual elements surrounding the rooms internalize the dynamics and logic of the cityscape and the street while externalizing the function of the homely-personal space, directing it outward. The apartment’s setting expresses no contradiction between the individual and the collective, referring to and bringing back the physical public sphere as an active factor, a platform for discussion, exchange, and contestation. > > > In relation to the title "A Ghost Returns" and its origin within a newspaper insert announcing the optional comeback of Karl Marx’s philosophy and leftist politics to the scene, the apartment becomes an act of evocation in which repressed views and visions reemerge, cracking the ostensibly seamless screen of what used to be our post-historical picture of the world. Moreover, the ‘resurrection’ of the Marxist-leftist apparition may signal the already unstable current global situation of combat between the American/European bloc and the Chinese/Russian/Iranian bloc, which, rather than a mere conflict between Capitalism and Communism, serves as a war on hegemony and dominance marking the weakening of the U.S. influence and the notion that history’s trajectory is again/still/always an ongoing battle. > > In the exhibition, Nemet implements a correspondence between photography as a mechanism of spectral images and what can be considered in the present-day political and cultural climate a ghostly way of life involving obsolete means of communication such as printed matter, as well as ideologies and sets of beliefs that seem to have vanished from the public sphere such as Marxism, and in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the perspective of peace and co-existence. All of this resurfaces in the exhibition as a sort of mirage, a material, yet bound to fall, appearance of an obscure world which nevertheless keeps haunting us. > > > The unfolded segments of the apartment accumulate to an image of a ruin, a past that did not (and does not) pass. In The Ruin, Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay.’ Within the framework of The Ruin, of the persistence of the past inside the present, the exhibition opens up a subtle historical horizon, devoid of a conclusive utopia, of the pretense to overcome the past or retroactively appropriating it. In this sense, the exhibition conveys the idea of a revolutionary future not as the end point of a linear, advancing course of time but as a mode of living with/among/next to the redeemed ghosts of history; a mode of cyclical temporality and constant recurrence. > > > > Ory Dessau