Palace (Working Title)

The exhibition was born out of paying attention to the story of the building in which it is displayed. A magnificent stone structure, built at the end of the nineteenth century, stood at a rare intersection of communities and initiatives, and over time became a kind of living archive of the urban, cultural, and political layers that accumulated around it. Adjacent to the "Hamiffal" (Heb. "the factory") building is the Waldorf Astoria Hotel which, in its first incarnation, was a hotel called "Palace" and that attempted to outline a vision of a grand future for Jerusalem at that time. Hanita Ilan approaches the historical material through a contemplative look at a particular moment in the city's development. She gathered snippets of information, photographs, archival documents, and testimonies, and brought them together as a starting point for the exhibition. Hanita's paintings emerge from the stories and images on the pictorial surface itself. The surface functions like a scroll that opens and folds, revealing and concealing, leaving the observer's gaze in a state of motion and constant wonder.