The Central Library
Over the course of about one year, Dalia Gal Sverdlin photographed bookshelves in the Souraski Central Library at Tel Aviv University. In this library, which is a part of an academic institution and not accessible to the general public, she chose to take photos of those books that cannot be taken out of the library and of those that, for various reasons, despite her yearnings, she has no access to. Gal points out the fact that in the age of digitization we imagine that we have free access to information, but in reality, access to knowledge has a hierarchy of its own. She attempts to raise questions: what is a library? Who is it intended for? How are the databases organized? Who can access them? The working process for this exhibition started with photos of the title La Parola Del Passato, an Italian periodical published since 1946, investigating the ancient world in order to suggest an interpretation of the present. In such way exists a concrete connection between a periodical, as a book on a shelf, and the conceptual context engaging the sequence between past and present. Out of the photographs of bookshelves, a body of work was created consisting of drawings in sketchbooks. “Sketchbooks” are, in fact, blank books. They are pre-bound, they have no content, no words. The visual content of the sketchbooks echoes the image of the library but without describing it in a realistic manner, but rather as an interpretation of a visual image. The inaccessibility of the book as an object of knowledge and time is examined with the tools of drawing, in order to produce a reduction of the image to a marking of book and shelf. The image of the book as an object and as a drawing suggests a new reading. Gal constructs the double-spreads of images thoughtfully; one beside the other and one after the other. The page in reference to the page beside it. The hallways, the shelves, the pages, the bindings, all receive here representations of rich visual study. Gal is not a researcher in the academic world, she is an artist attempting to formulate a position in the world, so when she gives up the ability to obtain permission to access the reserved content, she adopts the position of “immigrant”. A perspective she is familiar with, having herself immigrated to Israel from Mexico. In this context, the exhibition’s title, The Central Library, makes present the context of the symbolic space. The library as a cultural centre, found at the top of the social hierarchy, inaccessible for those arriving from the periphery of immigration, is the subject of longing for belonging that cannot be realized, and the view of the place, represented in the drawings in a similar way to the view of a landscape, creates a distance that contains reduction and abstraction. Gal chooses to present the sketchbooks as an installation of printed strips hanging from top to bottom around the space. This allows opening of the book, access to it, as an opposite experience to that she had experienced. To allow this to happen, she goes back to the action of photography, the starting point of the project, and spreads in space what is contained in the contents. Thus, a new library is created in the exhibition.
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon
