Before the Train
Solo Exhibition, 2022 Jaffa Well House /
Curator: Noam Alon /
Artistic support: Eiv Kristal
With the support of: Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts
and Tel Aviv-Jaffa City Council
Press: ‘Tal Kronkop creates choreography for urban transport’
Joy Bernard, Portfolio Magazine [October 2020]
Although the train is a symbol of progress and development, it encroaches at the same time, on other forms of life, takes over the space and reshapes it. Tal Kronkop's solo exhibition dwells on this tension and is located in a liminal moment in time, before the arrival of the light rail to Jaffa.
— Noam Alon, Curator
The train actually continues the line of reporting facts on the ground to the city's residents, such as the establishment of Jerusalem Boulevard itself in 1915. The boulevards were created as a project of the Ottomans, who forced Jews and Arabs alike to build the boulevards quickly in order to facilitate movement in Jaffa and give it a Parisian look. The famous boulevards of Paris, designed by Baron Haussmann, were also supposedly intended to give an aesthetic and orderly appearance to the city. In practice, they were intended to be used by the army for efficient movement and to eliminate any possibility of rebellion. Avenues are created with the aim of neutralizing barricades: rebels can no longer build walls to take over a part of the city, when the army can easily reach them from another avenue. Those responsible for the branding of the light rail project correspond in their way with this historic move and claim that their goal is to transform Jerusalem Boulevard into a "vibrant, renewed and progressive public space ... inspired by the most beautiful cities in the world." However Jaffa, isn’t endowed with its own unique beauty? What does the modernization of Jaffa serve? Which identity will be erased in favor of the European image that will replace it?
The light rail project does indeed guarantee faster and more efficient mobility in the urban space, which is currently suffering from overload. The city is full of excessive traffic of private means of transport (bicycles, scooters and other motorized phenomena), which make their way between failed infrastructures and too often collide with each other. But doesn't the fast movement of a massive vehicle, no matter how new and shiny, threaten those who wish to live at a different, slower and gentler pace? Kronkop offers us a "softer" view of Jerusalem Boulevard, and unfolds before us a space in which there are many layers and tangles of movement, some of them agile and purposeful, and some "inefficient", dragging and dreamy. Through documentation techniques, between video and performance, she seeks to observe the boulevard and the tensions embodied in it since its inception, just before it changes its skin. Through an implicit use of museum display modes, she creates images in space that accumulate almost into an act of commemoration. Before the train invites us to pay our last respects to the present reality, before its past-present is erased and replaced by one element, too conspicuous to the eye, that will occupy the avenue and overshadow it with its presence.
— Noam Alon, Curator
‘Kronkop has created a critical but inviting space, in which she presents the results of archival, photographic and movement-led research she conducted in Jaffa as part of a three-month artistic residency there upon her return to Israel from residence in London. The central work in the space is a short film that bears the same name as the exhibiti’on and shows the slow, onward and agonizing journey of four young performers rolling on giant ‘soft’ rocks along the abandoned railroad tracks.’
"The train is a historical symbol. It symbolizes the beginning of cinema and in some way also the beginning of a certain standard of time. When it entered our lives, the Western world began to orient itself according to its arrival and departure times. Now it raises the question of whether here too, in Jaffa, the train will become a historical symbol of something we don't yet know what it is, which is about to happen.'
Photos: Daniel Hanoch
