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20090415-exodus-2048-by-bradford-wintersThe year is 2048 and the nation of Israel has all but collapsed in an overnight power vacuum brought about by the double-headed disaster that coincides with its centennial: a downward spiral in foreign aid from a much weakened America, combined with the demographic liability of an exploding Palestinian population, leaves the Jewish state ripe for a takeover by its Arab majority, beginning with the fall of Tel Aviv that sparks a larger exodus driven more by fear and paranoia than bullets and bloodshed.

The Israeli government has regrouped in exile in Brooklyn, while the New State of Israel (Israel Hakhadasha) takes root in Uganda….

Or at least this is the case in the vision of Michael Blum, the Jerusalem-born and Vienna-based artist commissioned by the Van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, to create an installation for its Be(com)ing Dutch exhibit mounted there last year. Recently I was lucky enough to catch its traveling offshoot, Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance, mounted at the New Museum in New York City.

As the events play out in Blum’s vision, a ship dubbed Exodus 2048 and loaded with 4,500 refugees sets sail from Tel Aviv (renamed Jaffa in the takeover) in search of sanctuary abroad. Taking his cue from history to imagine a future not as far-fetched as it might first sound, Blum’s working paradigm recalls the real-world Exodus 1947, whose own cargo of Holocaust survivors hoping to settle in British-controlled Palestine found themselves instead deported to West Germany.

Forty years from now, after months adrift on the North Sea while the EU’s Crime and Immigration Ministers debate its fate, after history repeats itself (a pointed note to those who would forget it) with England’s denial of permission to dock at Kingston-upon-Hull, the Exodus 2048 gains temporary harbor privileges in Rotterdam at the Quarantine Pier.

Not allowed to disembark, however, the refugees undertake a hunger strike which only ends weeks later when a group of five buildings in Noord-Brabant are requisitioned to serve as short-term refugee camps. Hence the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven becomes home to 120 Israeli refugees awaiting decision on their applications for asylum.

I was sold before I even saw the installation, as the very idea manages to close the chasm between such cultural polarities as the art museum and refugee camp, by not only allowing the former to double for the latter, but by suggesting as well that the latter all too often doubles for a version of the former.

I saw it as I stepped off the elevator at the New Museum. I peered through the gaps in white bedsheets hung for curtains all along the perimeter of the installation. On the other side was a world as immediate as it was remote, a human pigsty awash in the detritus of upheaval: luggage, books, ashtrays, and Legos; diapers, clotheslines, graffiti, and TVs; loose change, gutted pillows, Jewish folk music, and cola; a wheelchair here, Barbie dolls having intercourse there; and, perhaps most poetically of all in the reversals of fortune that Blum entertains, a FedEx envelope going nowhere inside a baby stroller.

Overnight indeed. All the various and sundry items you or I might pack if suddenly we found ourselves in a similar position. Not that we have cause to fret for the future in America these days.

In a mock interview with a passenger of Exodus 2048 twenty years after the fact, one Miri Stern, an Israeli scientist and founder of the Eretz Houven kibbutz in Eindhoven, looks back on those events and says: “Nothing contaminates faster than fear. We were all scared, and the fear of one fed the fear of the other. The whole country sensed a danger and was frantically running away….”

As more and more families this side of the Atlantic take to tent cities and motels alike, little did the exhibit’s curators know at the time of its conception in 2006 how resonant a home “Be(com)ing Dutch at a Distance” would find in New Amsterdam amidst the tumult of 2009.

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