We all know that context can change
the meaning of a work of art. Today, the Berlin Wall has no tangible relevance in Israel, and no doubt anyone confronted with your installation will perceive it as a metaphor for another wall. Was this your intention?
The relatively open-minded spirit of Berlin
seems to have relevance for a lot of young Israelis, who visit the city frequently or even decide to move here. The wall as we present it at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, in spite of its resemblance to the Berlin Wall, is also a blank surface for projection. The associations with other walls, personal
or public, occur within the individual spectator.
We often work with displacement. In that sense, the displacement of the wall ts with works such as Prada Marfa, where we built a Prada store in the Texan desert, or with Please, keep quiet!, a hospital room at the National Gallery
of Denmark. For us, art is also a sort of research. We do not know exactly what happens when we put a foreign object into a new setting.
What about the gra ti—you decided to leave the concrete wall plain. Why?
The gra ti only existed to a small extent in certain areas on the West side of the wall. The famed East Side Gallery along the River Spree is a complete falsi cation of history. It is of course much more fun to look at, and therefore much more popular as a tourist destination, than the somber Berlin Wall Memorial in Mitte, which is more historically accurate.