The Museum

The Museum on the Seam is a socio-political contemporary art museum located in Jerusalem. The Museum in its unique way, presents art as a language with no boundaries in order to raise controversial social issues for public discussion. At the center of the changing exhibitions in the Museum stand the national, ethnic and economic seam lines in their local and universal contexts.

The Museum is committed to examining the social reality within our regional conflict, to advancing dialogue in the face of discord and to encouraging social responsibility that is based on what we all have in common rather than what keeps us apart.

Between May 2005 and June 2008 the Museum has presented a series of exhibitions on the theme of human rights. The series was opened with DEAD END that dealt with the threat that violence poses to our social fabric.

The second exhibition in the series EQUAL AND LESS EQUAL opened in September 2006. It dealt with work/slavery and exposed the distressed existence of man in a world of globalization and migration.

In the summer of 2007 BARE LIFE opened at the Museum, the third exhibition and last in the series dealing with human rights. The exhibition, which closed in June 2008, dealt with the disintegrating line between abnormal and normal situations. The exhibit pointed to the dangerous place where a temporary emergency situation can be turned into a legitimized status quo accepted by the silent majority, a situation that can in the end lead to a paranoia of suspicion and to the use of violence to re-establish public order.

Exhibition HEARTQUAKE, which was dedicated to exploring anxiety in its local and universal contexts, was opened in July 2008. HeartQuake tried to expose and to accentuate people’s emotional confrontation with their surroundings, and through the prism of anxiety to examine their responses as injurers and as injured - with the aim of understanding and influencing the dynamics of social and political relations.

In May 2009 NATURE NATION opened at the Museum Nature Nation is based on diverse aspects of distinctions, positions, beliefs, ideologies, and social, political and economic points of departure that explore the complex encounter between man and the environment and between man and nature. The exhibition proposed a critical reading, which presumes that the encounter between them is a mirror for broader phenomena. This mirror reflects the crisis in the relations between man and nature, which finds expression in neglect, conquest and deterioration.

Currently the Museum is showing exhibition HomeLessHome.

HomeLessHome will aspire to investigate the relationship between the private home and the state. It will study the formal and functional similarity between the two spaces which enables the definition of both as "home" (the national home), and the difference between them, which traditionally places the former in the private (or natural) sphere and the latter in the political sphere.

The difference will be explored in light of the traditional placement (since Aristotle) of the home as the "other" of the political, containing what has been removed from it, and thus defining the contours of the political, which it may not trespass. The home is seen as something "natural", as a space dominated by needs that are of no interest to the designed public space. Its interior is identified as a private, safe space, beyond the reach of legitimate intervention of the state.

The Museum is situated in a building constructed in 1932 by the Arab-Christian architect, Anton Baramki.

While Jerusalem was divided (1948-1967), the building served as a military outpost (the Turjeman Post) which stood on the seam line between Israel and Jordan across from Mandelbaum Gate, the only crossing point between the two sides of the divided city.

The Museum on the Seam was established in 1999 with the generous support of the von Holtzbrinck family of Germany, through the Jerusalem Foundation and by the initiative of the designer and curator of the Museum, Raphie Etgar.