The Middle Middle East

The Museum for Islamic Art

We are born into a certain reality. A certain geography, history, climate, culture, conventions, class, traditions, values and principles. A reality that influences the way we live and act, which fixates the way we see things and think about them. A subjective reality.

A collection of twenty messages, narratives that have been embedded within our collective memory, express a local paradox. Their mere existence will not allow a solution to the conflict within which the state of Israel exists within the middle eastern landscape, yet does not function as part of it.

In this project, which follows a research executed by Oded Ben Yehuda for his Masters degree in London where he disassembled and analyzed the term “Middle East”, he wishes to review the option of changing the said reality, and the stigmas, cliches, and traditional and fixated way of thought. By eliminating the borders of Israel and uniting it with its neighbours, a new state is formed – The Middle Middle East – which aims at redefining a reality in which foes become neighbours, and neighbours become countrymen.

We are born into a certain reality, identity, faith, starting point which is out of our control.

Or are we?

Concept: Oded Ben Yehuda
Design: Ilai Ovadia

A meeting with Oded Ben Yehuda will take place at the museum of Islamic Art on wednesday, 18 june at 18:00.

Museum opening hours during Jerusalem Design Week
Thursday 10:00 – 22:00
Friday 10:00 – 16:00
Saturday 10:00 – 22:00
Sunday: closed
Monday-Wednesday 10:00-15:00

On show in the Museum of Islamic Art is the exhibition Jewelery making: Past and present curated by dr. Iris Fishof. The exhibition generated a fascinating discourse, with the universal language of jewelry making, between Islam, Judism and Christianity, between cultures and ethnic identities, between tradition and inovation and between past and present.