The Virtual Musrara Museum is an initiative of Musrara, The Naggar School of Art and Society, and Musrara Galleries to have an additional display space in the school’s historic building in the Musrara neighborhood. The museum is a unique platform for presenting contemporary exhibitions in a virtual architectural space based on the school’s historic building plan. The museum offers an interactive and independent wandering experience.
The virtual exhibition Smoking Mountain presents photographs and video works documenting an exceptional meeting which took place in the winter of 2019–20. It now seems like a different time, right before the Corona virus altered our lives and our existence on this planet, and the possibilities for face-to-face encounters between people from different countries – let alone continents – were abruptly diminished. A team of five representatives from the Naggar School, we left Jerusalem for the United States on what we believed to be a formative journey of growth and change. We were to be hosted by Native American groups in Oregon and Washington, within the framework of the Communities Connecting Heritage (CCH) program, a remarkable international initiative dedicated to preserving the cultural legacies of endangered communities around the world and to forming connections among international organizations. The Naggar School was the first educational institution in Israel selected to participate in the CCH. On the American side, the meeting was arranged by Wisdom of the Elders, a Portland-based organization for the preservation the area’s Native American cultural traditions.
Participants: Asaf Alboher, Kunu Bearchum, Tim Keenan Burgess, Shirly Goffer, Harvest Moon Howell, Avi Sabag, Chesga Jackson, Duane Lane, Yali Reichert, Dana Shahar
LAWETLAT’LA – The Smoking Mountain Exhibition was created within the framework of “The Hero’s Journey of Transformation” project as part of Communities Connecting HeritageSM, a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State with funding provided by the U.S. Government and administered by World Learning.
Photo: Asaf Alboher