Jericho First

Overview

The exhibition "Jericho First" places at its centre a mosaic floor that was found in its entirety in the Hisham Palace (Khirbat al-Mafjar) in Jericho. The mosaic is attributed to Muslim art from the time of Umayyad dynasty, in the eighth century. The mosaic floor presents a central tree whose rich foliage is entwined on both sides with apples, quince citrus fruits attached by a thin and delicate stalk. Scenes are portrayed on both sides of the tree. On the right, a lion is attacking a deer that is trying to escape, while on the left, two deer are grazing in the pasture.

Sharif Waked, a Nazareth-born Palestinian artist, forms a connection between the name of the first stage of the Oslo Agreement - "Jericho First" - and the violent hunting scene.

At the centre of the exhibition there are two series of photographs that relate to this scene. In the series, the lion clinging to his prey and the deer become a silhouette together, while changing from image to icon. In the series, an unexpected process takes place in which the image changes (minimizing and expanding) according to a mathematical function that was fed into a graphic software. The serial changing creates a tension between seemingly-objective mathematical regularity and partial lack of control over the final result. In the first series, the image is minimized until it becomes a kind of insect image. In the second series, the image expands almost to the point of explosion. In both series, a growing gap is created between the original image and its mythical meaning and the sequence of images that echo the origin but draw away from it to the point of extinction.