8 September–4 October, 2000

Arni Haraldsson's new photographic works examine the physical, political and emotive identity of the landscape in and around Jerusalem. Haraldsson engages with the variable meanings and identities of one of the most contested landscapes of recent history, looking at the often ambiguous collision of ancient and contemporary. This examination of continuity and disjunction within Jerusalem and the history of Israel results in a complex reading of urban and post-urban spaces. Haraldsson writes, “My subject, then, has been the examination of place and landscape, but as exemplified by Jerusalem and environs, the merging of past and present, the entwinement of the mythic and the historical, the new Jerusalem and the complex realities of today.”

In this work Haraldsson photographs modernist architecture, ancient terraces carved into hillsides, as well as the Arabian pastoral (exemplified in the village of Lifta in West Jerusalem), examining the city as palimpsest. Haraldsson's work looks at structures as they grow, subsume, invade and fall into ruins, while cultures (politics and religion) converge and contrast. These works, consistent with the artist's past interests, speak of modernist promise and possibility amidst a postmodern politic, evoking a melancholy nostalgia through the ruinous picturesque.