The story of the Center for Contemporary Art cannot be separated from the history of its video archive. The archive began to take shape in the late 1990s, when the Center was still operating out of a small room at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. At the time, video editing equipment was expensive and largely inaccessible, and the archive served artists not only as a place to view and preserve works, but also as a space for editing and producing them.

Over the years, thousands of works entered the archive from a wide range of sources: the video art fund initiated by the Center; the “Local Time” screening series; the VideoZone Biennial, also initiated by the Center; and the CCA’s broader ongoing activities initiated and directed by Sergio Edelsztein. The archive did not take shape around one single, coherent narrative, but rather through a succession of choices, encounters, initiatives, and circumstances. It holds within it both the history of the medium and the history of the Center itself.

For this exhibition, a group of young artists working across a range of media were invited to spend time with the archive, to view its works, and to encounter the people and stories connected to its formation. They were not asked to represent or summarize the archive, but rather to offer a contemporary reading of it: to linger on an image, a material, or a memory; to attend to what has been preserved and to what is absent; and to consider how a historical body of works continues to live, shift, and acquire new meanings in the present.

Participating artists: Laila Abd Elrazaq, Dafna Amira, Liam Chambon, Adir Cohen, Tamar Perry

Curators: Hila Cohen-Schneiderman and Tamar Margalit