Biblioscopia
Multi channel video and sound installation, 2020-2024
Over the past few years, Hadassa Goldvicht has been documenting the steady emptying of the National Library’s storerooms, as its collection of books was being transferred from the Library’s historical residence on the Givat Ram University campus to an impressive, recently inaugurated building situated between the Knesset and the Israel Museum. Her complex, multi-channel, “symphonic” video work takes us on a journey deep into the bowels of the old library, where for years millions of books were making their way up and down an intricate system of conveyor belts, lifts, and openings, from the storerooms to the reading rooms and back down again.
As always in her works, Goldvicht doesn’t stop at the site itself but rather seeks out its human factor. The piece, which was fimed throughout several years, included interviews with the library’s staff as an integral part of the work. The new library building makes use of state-of-the art technology, boasting of automated storerooms and robots for locating the books. In contrast, Goldvicht’s videos of the old library basements reveal glimpses of the posters and postcards with which members of the staff decorated their workspace – traces of a human presence among the bookshelves and of the now- obsolete machinery on the site.
While Goldvicht was working on this project, she had gone through several MRI scans. As alluded in the title of the exhibition (biblio- comes from the Greek biblion, book, and scopia- means to look or examine), the way in which the medical equipment documented her body had a strong impact on how she viewed the subject of her work: in Biblioscopia, the old library building and its collection become “patients” undergoing an architectural and cultural MRI. The journey taken by the books is likened to a journey into a body of knowledge, such as that contained in the vast amount of books we see being arranged on the shelves in the storeroom. Some are exposed to our gaze and familiar to us, others remain covered, concealed, unknown. Continuing the artist’s long-standing preoccupation with the materiality of language, Goldvicht’s work takes us deep into the physical and spiritual infrastructure of Israel’s National Library – the intricate channels of our culture’s subconscious, which appear like a network of underground rivers. At a time when the idea of the subterranean is rife with connotations of war and tragedy, Biblioscopia uses it to bring to light the wonders of human knowledge and culture hoarded in the library’s infinite, continuously growing body of books, offering the process of art as an act of reflection and possible recovery.
Curator: Dr. Amitai Mendelsohn
