The point of departure of the prospective exhibition ‘South as a State of Mind’ is the conception of the South as a destabilizing force that questions the approaches, patterns of thought, and institutions that shaped the cultural history of the West. The South is brought here as a response or a mental state that breathes erratic and unstable creativity into the Western sphere. 

Nikos Papastergiadis, Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures at the University of Melbourne and co-editor of Third Text, conceives of the South as a defense mechanism against Northern hegemony. The South, according to Papastergiadis, is a sphere where people meet in order to imagine alternative ways of being in the world; a space for the establishment of a “little public sphere” in which strangers meet and construct through dialogue new forms of exchange and mutual understanding[1].

In light of Papastergiadis’s conception of the South and following my work as founder and curator of an artists’ residency program and of an art center in the Negev desert in the south of Israel – the exhibition is based on insights from my period in the south of Israel and presents three possibilities for artistic and environmental expressions of the Southern state of mind. 

The first takes place within an exhibition of historical artefacts at a Western museum and serves a defense mechanism against the dominance of a Western cultural narrative by acknowledging its origins in the Mediterranean Basin; the second surprisingly looks at the far North as a manifestation of the Southern state of mind, observing how a “little public sphere” in the far North creates an environment to imagine alternative ways of being that cope with human intervention in the landscape and global warming; the third presents a science-based agricultural-educational project that serves as a Southern model of production, organization, preservation, and dissemination of situated knowledges[2] of the Negev desert. 

“I Feel Nothing”: A Southern Female Body in the West

Jumana Emil Abboud, I Feel Nothing, 9:10., stills from video, 2012.

Jumana Emil Abboud (b. 1971) who was born in Palestine and grew up in Canada, returned to Palestine/Israel in her twenties. She completed her studies in Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem in the mid-1990s and has since developed a deepening interest in Palestinian culture, specifically in the knowledge that accumulated in defiance of colonialist-driven cultural erosion. 

I Feel Nothing (2012), a series of paintings, drawings, and video, is the result of Emil Abboud’s years-long investigation into local culture, specifically into Palestinian oral tradition of tales and legends. One of these legends, whose protagonist is a girl whose hands have been violently amputated, prompted a creative process in Emil Abboud’s work whereby hands and their absence became a central feature. 

In a powerful scene of the video installation titled I Feel Nothing, that incorporates footage of hands caressing, plucking and touching, the artist’s hands are filmed caressing a series of exhibits from ancient Rome and Greece in the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge. 

The hands gently reveal themselves from behind the statue of a man, fondling and caressing his marble body parts. As they disturb the silence shrouding the statues, Emil Abboud’s hands violate the public code of museums. By challenging its “do not touch” policy, Abboud undermines the fundamental property of art collections in institutions of culture and art, which exclude the observer’s body. 

By resonating the tale of the handless girl, the artist’s hands appear as autonomous agents that present forms of knowledges that are not quite at home inside a Western museum. By implanting her embodied presence in the Cambridge collection, the artist calls into question Western methods of collection, classification and organization of knowledge that have dominated global art collections and are not necessarily inept to preserve and exhibit non-object-based cultural forms such as oral traditions. 

Nonetheless, I Feel Nothing does not suffice with only disturbing Western curatorial traditions. It also leads the viewers to recognize the irony folded into the Western cultural narrative. While the Western marble collection is made up of artefacts acquired through colonialist conquests that displaced from the Mediterranean Basin, the original culture of the region is diminishing. The movement of cultural artifacts from the Mediterranean to the West points to how colonial procedures affect local cultures. 

Emil Abboud’s embodied presence within a Western historical art collection turn the audience’s attention to the urgency embedded in preserving local cultures, including Palestinian culture. As a woman and as a Palestinian artist tracing her diminishing culture, the artist’s diverged presence amidst the white marbles stresses her alienation towards the collection. 

I Feel Nothing serves as a defense mechanism toward the curatorial approaches of Western cultural institutions that shape their cultural narrative on a distorted history. By drawing her viewer’s attention to how a seemingly innocent collection of Greek and Roman marbles in a Cambridge collection is part of a much larger and complex process of cultural erasure, Emil Abboud’s operates a defense mechanism to the continuous elimination of Palestinian culture in Western contexts.  

The New Mineral Collective: Southern Art in the North

The New Mineral Collective, Hollow Earth, 22:27, stills from video, 2013

At around the same time Emil Abboud explored the Southern origins of the collection at Cambridge, the New Mineral Collective (NMC) explored their place of residence in the North Pole. The collective, that was founded in 2012 by Canadian artist Tanya Busse and Lithuanian artist Emilija Škarnulyte˙, responds to the altering landscape of the far North in face of accelerated human intervention and climate change. 

Unlike landscape art experiments conducted in the mid-twentieth century by artists such as Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt in the southern US who conceptually understood southern land as a neutral space for artistic experimentation, NMC regard their surroundings in a very concrete manner. Their artworks sketch out the far-reaching transformation of the Northern landscape due to accelerated human intervention and climate change. 

The title of the video work Hollow Earth (2013) hints to the massive mining operations and accelerated climate change that occasionally cause massive collapses of the icy landscape into the belly of the land. Hollow Earth is filmed at the meeting point between Norway, Sweden, and Russia, and serves as a meticulous examination of the remaining living presence in the area. 

Pointing to the dwindling number of enduring creatures’ struggle for survival in their natural habitat, the artwork summons a comparison with countless representations of post-human landscapes in film and television. Nonetheless, in contrast with film crews flying in helicopters from afar to document climate change and to present it to the world, Hollow Earth offers the point of view of those on the ground. 

Recording a series of everyday moments in their surroundings that include a rear view of the head of a helicopter pilot hovering above empty stretches of land, a herd of deer crossing the screen with bright serial numbers displayed on their fur, hollow silhouettes maneuvering heavy engineering gear at the heart of a quarry—the work delicately outlines the mechanics of landscape transformation.

Hollow Earth serves as a defense mechanism to the accelerated Western approach to climate change that documents them from helicopters in the air. Instead, it is an audio- visual meditation from the perspective of those that closely experience climate change and the destructive human interference in the landscape. Due to its slow pace and its concentration on details, Hollow Earth contends Western representations of climate change that concentrate on massive changes but miss the humane perspective.    

Hollow Earth accommodates the instability of life at the most northern parts of the globe. Through the creative and sensitive eyes of Busse and Škarnulyte˙, one may imagine how human and non-human beings may create alternative forms of exchange and mutual understandings in the landscapes of the future. 

Wadi Attir: Southern Situated Knowledges

Wadi Attir, March 2021. Photos: Yuval Chen

Since it is not an artwork, the third facet of the (imagined) exhibition ‘South as a State of Mind’, poses a challenge to the exhibition that presents artworks. Wadi Attir is a project of sustainable farming that makes use of ancient agricultural traditions for growing crops and keeping farm animals of the region. Roughly 100-acres large, Wadi Attir is located twenty minutes outside of Be’er-Sheva, the main metropole of the Negev desert.  

The project was founded in 2007 by Muhammad Al-Nabari, former mayor of Hura, and Michael Ben-Eli, an architect who founded the Sustainability Laboratory in New York, an American non-profit that manifests a communal and interdisciplinary approach to research, development, and education. Committed to educational, social and environmental conditions of the region, founders Al-Nabari and Ben-Eli based the project on their inventive instincts. 

Al-Nabari, a doctor of organic chemistry who has twelve patents under his name, and was the mayor of Hura when the farm was established, is known for his leadership skills and the impressive results he brought to the city during his term. Following his work in the local government, Al-Nabari founded a number of non-profits in the Negev dedicated to the advancement of the Arab-Bedouin population in areas such as public health, economic development, and local government. 

Al-Nabari’s partner, Ben-Eli, brings to the project his innovative approach to architecture by creating living environments. As an architecture student, Ben-Eli worked with American architect, inventor, and futurist Richard Buckminster Fuller. Fuller is known for the development of the geodesic dome, an efficient building technique for temporary dome-like structures composed of triangles. This technique became known in the 1960s and remained highly popular throughout the rest of the century. Fuller trained Ben-Eli in this technique, and Ben-Eli made use of it to plan temporary structures for housing the homeless on the streets of New York. Ben-Eli leveraged Fuller’s utopist building technique as an ideological approach to architecture committed to collective action for positive change. 

The principles that led Al-Nabari and Ben-Eli to establish Wadi Attir recall the principles of avant-garde artists from the previous century, particularly artists whose work were socially and politically driven, such as Joseph Beuys, who was a member of the avant-garde group Fluxus. 

Including Wadi Attir in an exhibition challenges the logic behind its curation and summons a curatorial concept that copes with this curatorial experiment. Exploring the project in terms of community-based Israeli art and heritage brings one to the prominent discussion led by the Israeli art critic and theorist Sara Chinski in the mid-twentieth century. 

The discussion into the role of social or community-based art in Israeli is rooted in ideas articulated by Chinski, specifically in ‘Silence of the Fish: The Local and the Universal in Israeli Art Discourse’[3]. The text explores the history of Israeli social art and its affinity to nature and community in Israel. In the significant text, Chinski criticizes the attempt to translate global social art into local terms. She bases her argument on the fact that the fundamental principles of the Western avant-garde – action, totality, and commitment – had failed locally. 

Chinski pinpointed precisely how these principles were distorted in the local ethos of social or community-based Israeli art. Claiming that not only did social or community-based art defy its purpose, but it unwittingly affirmed, even reinforced, a colonialist worldview. 

To reinforce her argument, Chinski named artist Avital Geva’s The Ecological Greenhouse as an example for this standpoint. The social-environmental project, which was initially created in a kibbutz in 1977 as an educational platform for agricultural experiments, was exhibited by the curator Gideon Ofrat in the Venice Biennale in 1993. 

As argued by Chinski, Geva’s project demonstrates the danger of social or community-based projects to unintentionally reinforce a colonialist Zionist worldview. A perspective that sanctifies the supposed ultimate connection between the Jew and the land, even at the price of Jews occupying territories and displacing the local population. 

In line with Chinski’s critique of Avital Geva’s The Ecological Greenhouse, the strength of the inclusion of Wadi Attir in the exhibition South as a State of Mind, lies in its liberation from the deadlock that Chinski presented. By reconstructing the living conditions of ancient communities that have populated the Negev desert for generations and re-enacting its situated knowledges, the project does not fall into the trope of a colonial perspective on the connection between the desert resident and the land.

Wadi Attir is a local initiative that provides employment to the Arab Bedouin residents of the region, with an emphasis on the employment of Arab Bedouin women who suffer from higher unemployment rates. In its approach to the local natural environment, it recreates ancient ways of life and preserves Arab-Bedouin agricultural methods. Wadi Attir is a social and educational project that (re-)teaches the Arab Bedouin community its traditional agricultural techniques.

Introducing methods of collecting, sorting, cataloguing, preserving, and disseminating situated knowledges, the project advances modes of the curatorial that are not practiced by regional cultural institutions.[4] Not only is the project not in need of an artistic framing, but it also proposes new terms and frames of thought for the contemporary art discourse to consider in terms of developing a southern state of the curatorial. 

As a defense mechanism against the hegemony of Western cultural canon that is applied by many of the cultural institution in the region and that inadvertently obliterate the local culture of the desert, Wadi Attir proposes an advanced form of the curatorial that do not displace local artifacts and exhibit them far away from their roots, but rather preserves and exhibits situated knowledges on site. Wadi Attir is a southern “little public sphere” in which people can imagine alternative ways of being in the world that are not destructive but rather construct new forms of exchange and mutual understandings between living and non-living beings.

Summary

The exchanges and affinities between I Feel Nothing, Hollow Earth and Wadi Attir is the raison d’etre of the exhibition South as a State of Mind. Each of the three projects strengthen the conception of the South as a subverting power that complicates Western approaches, patterns of thought, and institutions. 

I Feel Nothing, presents one of the core elements of the Southern state of mind, and that is the south as a defense mechanism against Western cultural dominance. Amidst the West’s cultural confinements, Emil Abboud conjures a momentary platform inside a Western cultural institution for obliterated Southern cultural traditions and situated knowledges to appear. 

The creation of a mise-en-scène that (re-) introduces Southern culture into a Western institutional setting is reminiscent of how Hollow Earth creates a “little public sphere” in the Northern climate-change-stricken landscape. Hollow Earth documents how humans and non-humans create alternative ways of being and survival tactics in a world that must adapt to an increasingly hostile environment. 

Like Hollow Earth, Wadi Attir creates a southern “little public sphere”. But in contrast to NNC’s artwork that is presented as a video piece, Wadi Attir is documented through a series of photographs as a continuous, live, community-based action, based on local research and a Jewish-Arab partnership. Although it is not presented as an artwork but rather as documentation of a process-based project, Wadi Attir serves a curatorial model for the future of collecting, preserving, and exhibiting situated knowledges, especially in Southern regions, for non-object-based artifacts such as oral traditions, agricultural procedures and living organisms.

The affinities between the three projects, piece together a mental state that creates an antidote to Western cultural traditions that continue to obliterate valuable situated knowledges from the South.

Hadas Kedar is a curator and researcher based in the Negev desert. She received her PhD from the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Studies, University of Reading (UK) with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating (Zurich). Kedar is a faculty member at The Mandel Center for Leadership in the Negev where she co-manages a program dedicated to the Arab Bedouin community of the Negev desert. She is also a lecturer in the Visual and Material Culture Department, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem where she focuses on community-led artistic projects.

Kedar established Arad Art and Architecture (f.2014) residency program and Arad Contemporary Art Center (f.2016) in the Negev desert where she
developed her focus on desert communities' art and culture. She is also a free­lance curator that has organized exhibitions in the UK, Germany and Israel. Kedar is the winner of the first Israeli Art House grant for curatorial research for an under-represented female artist (2023). Among her curatorial endeavors: OrLa, Artists’ House, Jerusalem (2025); Israeli Shots, Asperger Gallery, Berlin (2010); The Door to the Secret Garden, Herzlia Museum of Art (2022); Woman Resources, Arad Contemporary Art Center (2016).

Kedar’s main research fields include Participatory Practices, Social Change, Indigenous Thought. Her PhD title: Keeping the Edges Open: Towards
a Curatorial Horizon in the Negev Desert.