“Imaginary Coordinates,” the provocative exhibition at the Spertus Museum that closed earlier this month for organizers to re-evaluate content, has reopened with the major change being that visitors now must see it on guided tours beginning at the head of every hour. Nearly everything else is unchanged, meaning the show is still the most surprising of the eight with art in Chicago’s Festival of Maps as well as a rewardingly unconventional commemoration of the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding.
The show is satisfying on both counts largely because while its focus is the Middle East, its treatment emphasizes the Holy Land as much as an idea as a place, and the old maps chosen often reflect idiosyncratic views that bring them closer to artworks than tools for determining boundaries.
The contemporary art — by eight Israeli- and Palestinian-born women — then takes off from highly flexible notions of place, relating geography to history, aspiration, imagination and the human body. So more symbolic treatments of the maps are extended, not only into areas of thought foreign to cartographers but also into media far beyond the mapmakers’ drawing and printmaking.
The exhibition does not, however, stop there. It includes everyday objects — embroidered souvenirs, T-shirts and shorts, medals, refrigerator magnets, envelopes, stamps — that represent Palestine and Israel in different ways. They reflect, in a sense, how places are held in the popular mind, which may take into account geography but has much more to do with memories and wishes and dreams.
All of this working together — plus a 108-page book that extends the show’s premises — makes for a sharp, multileveled experience not at all parochial. The issues in play are common to many locales that have occupied a great place in thought throughout the centuries. But unlike if the spotlight were on Athens or Rome or Byzantium, here the artists give the place living presence, directly and indirectly.
The best pieces are the least direct, as they aspire toward the universal. Shirley Shor’s shifting projection on sand, for example, might as easily refer to the changing boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I as the Holy Land today. And Sigalit Landau’s video of the nude female body as a landscape of pain recasts the stuff of legend in a contemporary image fresh and startling.
The longest of the video pieces, Yael Bartana’s “Summer Camp,” is 12 minutes. But, in general, the works, which include pointed essays by Mona Hatoum and Enas I. Muthaffar, are succinct, an essential quality when so much on view claims attention. I want to see more only in the case of Michal Rovner’s “Decoy 29 B,” a triptych weakened by not showing its two other panels.
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“Imaginary Coordinates” continues at the Spertus Museum, 610 S. Michigan Ave., through Sept. 7. 312-322-1700.
aartner@tribune.com
