Art Works

The Middle 

Middle East

Jerusalem Design Week 2019

We are born into a certain reality. We are thrust into a certain geography, history, climate, culture, conventions, class, traditions, values and principles. These realities influence the way we live and act, which fixates the way we see things and think about them. This is the definition of subjective reality.

A collection of twenty messages, narratives that have been embedded within our collective memory, express a local paradox. Their mere existence will not allow a solution to the paradox in which the state of Israel exists in the middle eastern landscape, yet does not function as a part of it.

This project follows a research conducted by Oded Ben-Yehuda as part of his Master’s degree in London, where he disassembled and analyzed the term “Middle East”. 

Ben-Yehuda wishes to review the option of changing this reality by removing stigmas, cliches and fixated ways of thought. By eliminating the borders of Israel and uniting it with its neighbors, a new state is formed: ״The Middle Middle East״. This new state aims to redefine a reality in which foes become neighbors, and neighbors become countrymen. 

We are born into a certain reality, identity, faith, a starting point which is out of our control. Is this true?