Adon Melech Ben-Zion Building 1932 & Dr. Berlin Building 1933

     Homage to Valeska Gert and Jacob Pinkerfeld

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● Room Installation + external wall | squeegee, oil-tempera, class-chalk on         walls. Space measures: ca. 3.00 x 6.00 x 5.50 m.                                               Text: handwritten on external wall | class-chalk, industrial color on plaster          wall. Same text included in 'The Militia Dreams', D.C.A.C., Washington 94.

●   Whitewashed when the show was closed.

●   'Ha'Aretz' Building (The historical newspaper home) | Tel-Aviv,                                       Tel-Aviv in the Tracks of the Bauhaus         

      Curator: Rachel Sukman

●    Assistants: Guy Ben-Ner, Doron Salomons.

●    Photography: Noa Streichman 

 ● The story of  Adon Melech Ben-Zion Building 1932 & Dr. Berlin Building          1933: 

   A letter to a beloved girl who left the country. Written by a Tel-Aviv man, an       Israeli wars handicapped, one-eyed limbless, a maniac with a craze for           symmetry who spends his time in front of a window brooding the imaginary

   joint of two buildings.

 ● The female figure on inner walls: Valeska Gert, 1892-1978.

     A Berlin-Jewess satirical cabaret actress, singer, dancer, and writer. In her      defiant eccentric style, her use of mask-like grimaces, and by the complex      articulation of her body, Valeska Gert created grim portraits of her time.            'Tod' (Death'), and 'Danses Surrealistes' are among her well-known                  creations. She collaborated with Eisenstein and Renoir, wrote articles for         'Die Weltbühne', and 'Der Berliner Tagezeitung', and performed in many          Avant-Garde plays and films the important of which were 'Ein                            Sommernachtstraum' (1925)in which she played Puck, 'Die Freudlose

    Gasse' (1925),('Cheerless Lane'), and 'Tagebuch einer Verlorenen' ('Diary        of a Lost Girl') in1929. Between 1922-1930 she worked with Bertholt                Brecht playing in his cabaret 'Die Rote-Zibebe', in 'Dreigroschenoper'              ('Three Penny Opera'), and in 'Wir sind ja sooo Zufrieden' ('Yes We Are            Sooo Satisfied'). She founded several cabarets, among them the 1932 

    'Kohlkopp'. In 1933 she had run from the Nazis to the United States where      she lived on the welfare of the Jewish Refugees Committee and worked as      a plate cleaner and nude model. Between 1941-5 she finally managed to        found and run 'The Beggar Bar'. The 'Hexenkuche' ('The Witches Kitchen')      was founded on her comeback in Berlin in 1950. A living legend in the            '60s, she worked with Fellini ('Giulietta degli Spiriti'), Fassbinder, and                Volker Schlondörff.

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 ●   Valeska Gert wrote four different autobiographies.

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 ●   Squeegee-painted postures of Valeska Gert are scattered all over three          of the installation's inner walls. The sources are still photos from                        'Kupplerin' ('The Matchmaker') 1925, and 'Salome' her independent 1923        creation where she is seen in one of her famous gestures holding the                imaginary head of John the Baptist between her hands.

 ●  The buildings on inner walls: Jacob Pinkerfeld, 1897-1953

   Modernist architect and a researcher. Jacob Pinkerfeld grew in Galicia. He studied mathematics and architecture in Vienna, was compelled to drop out when drafted into the Austrian army, and he arrived in Palestine in 1920 with the Shomer Hatzair pioneers. There he worked in the reclaiming of the Zichron Ya'acov marshes and had fallen ill with pneumonia and malaria. He returned to Europe and in 1925 graduated from the Vienna Technical High Institution, as an Engineer-Architect. That same year he returned to Palestine and for a short period of time worked in the Mandatory Department of Public Works, subsequently opening an independent office where he started developing his plans for public and rural construction gaining shortly a central position among the architects of the Kibbutz Movement. Pinkerfeld planned numerous farmhouses, agricultural training farms, culture halls, nurseries and kindergartens, institutional and kibbutz dining rooms, as well as memorials and gravestones, and also furniture and installation accessories when the occasion arose. The Hannah House in Tel-Aviv, the dining room of Kibbutz Merchavia, and the Berl Katznelson House in The Tel-Aviv Workers Quarter № 6 are of his finest works. Pinkerfeld was a Viennese Modernist and a leftist.

    In his youth, Pinkerfeld started to develop his interest and theories questioning the possible identity of Jewish craftsmanship and architecture. In the '40s, shortly prior to the extermination of the European Jews, he was summoned by President Ben-Zvi to carry out vast research of the synagogues of Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. His expeditions started in Italy (1939), expanded to the central and eastern European countries, and then he traveled to Aden (1949) Bagdad, and North Africa (1954). He measured, photographed, and documented painstakingly dozens of synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, and had laid the base of a Jewish-Islamic Architecture comparative study. His huge archive had become the infrastructure of the Tel-Aviv Diaspora Museum.

    In 1943 Pinkerfeld conducted an exhaustive study on synagogues in Palestine and started to publish his academic essays, as well as articles directed at a wider audience.
   After the establishment of the State of Israel, he worked in the Department of Antiquities. He prepared plans for conservation and reconstruction of historical sites, such as Megido, the Monfort, the ancient synagogue of Bar-Am as well as many Islamic sites. He participated in the excavations of Hamat Gader, Korazim, Meron, and Beit Shearim. In 1950 he founded and stood at the head of 'Ganza', the Society for Jewish Craft, which later became the Tel-Aviv Museum of Ethnography and Folklore. In 1956, during an exploration tour in Ramat Rachel, Pinkerfeld was shot and killed from gunshots fired by the Jordanian Legion.

   He was the brother of the poet Anda Amir –Pinkerfeld and became Golda Meir in-laws.

 ●       In 1993 a friend of mine had found the private Pinkerfeld archive in a               dump in one of Wadi Ayalon dikes, few meters from my studio at the                 time.  We brought up in the studio about dozen cases in which were                 hundreds of manuscripts, accomplished and un- accomplished                       architectonic plans, photographed models, letters, countless                             architectural photos, precious historical documents, and thousands of             negatives from all of his travels.  Parts of this material were wasted                   away. We located the family and delivered the cases to the Givat                       Ha'Viva Archive of the Kibbutz Movement. 

 ●      The squeegee-painted buildings seen in the installation, as well as the              drawings of architectonic elements were all modeled on documents                   found in Pinkerfeld's archive. The Children-Home of Kibbutz                             Merchavia appeared previously in the first 1992 installation in the Tivon             Memorial Center, a year before the strange arrival of the archive on my             doorstep. The Tel-Aviv Promenade Cite, an unknown project                             of Pinkerfeld, designs and photographed plaster models of which I                   found in one of the cases are squeegee-painted on the central wall.                 Pinkerfeld was very loyal to the modernist doctrine, and his                               constructions were innocent of Orientalism. However, the surprising                 domes  set that he had envisioned for the cover of the promenade                   structures reveals the immense curiosity he had for the Islamic                         mosques and Khans along the coast, like the Sidni-'Ali Khan which he             studied too.

●       Pinkerfeld sketches were useful for me in other two installations done               earlier in 1994 in Washington: The Militia Dreams, and The Roof and the           Ink Bottle of J. Pinkerfeld