Sine Qua Non

Sine Qua Non Commentary by Diana Lipton Cite Share Show Bible Passage [Y]our offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs and shall be enslaved people, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. (Genesis 15:13–14; own translation) In ‘Disrupted Layer’, a 2023 exhibition at the Israel Museum of Jerusalem curated by Sally Haftel Naveh and Tali Sharvit, seven works created especially for the exhibition by artist Zohar Gotesman (b. Israel, 1979) were placed in and around the museum’s Archaeology Wing. The first work visitors encounter is a mock Assyrian relief, resting at the entrance to the wing on a pallet jack. It’s a quotation of a seventh-century BCE relief from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Lachish, Nineveh. Created for the Palace of Sennacherib, the Assyrian king who besieged Jerusalem and subjugated Abram’s descendants, the original relief, damaged and incomplete, is on view at the British Museum. Gotesman retains just one member of the ancient relief’s crew of enslaved people, and he ‘restores’ what Assyriologists concur was the original cargo: a lamassu, the Assyrian winged bull-human hybrid, probably destined to guard the palace gates. The subject matter of Gotesman’s relief—an artefact on a kind of sledge being pulled by an enslaved person—is a microcosm or ‘doubling’ of his artwork in its entirety: it is an artefact on a pallet jack. His relief’s solitary enslaved person parallels the lone museum worker tasked with moving it. But in Gotesman’s artwork the worker is absent, and in that respect it mirrors not so much the one enslaved person he retained, as the many enslaved people he eliminated from his relief, and perhaps even the missing lamassu he ‘restored’ from the original relief. Where is this object going, museum visitors ask themselves? And where is the museum worker who should be taking it there? By spotlighting the single enslaved person pulling the lamassu, and provoking speculation about the whereabouts of the museum worker, Gotesman elevates both the lowly enslaved person over the lamassu—the mysterious object that typically commands our attention in a museum—and the typically overlooked museum worker over the artwork he (Gotesman) has made—as well as over other works like it in the museum space. For all its intrigue, it deflects our attention beyond itself, and encourages us to question the museum’s very raison d'être. References Borschel-Dan, Amanda. 2023. ‘Podcast: At the Israel Museum, Touring 7 New Wonders of the Ancient World, 27 January 2023’, www.timesofisrael.com, available at https://www.timesofisrael.com/podcast-at-the-israel-museum-touring-7-new-wonders-of-the-ancient-world/ [accessed 2 December 2024]