A Beach 2013 Revisited (2023)
A Beach (2013), having settled into an ordinary weekend leisure spot for local Israelis, now repeats itself just a helicopter ride south of Jaffa in Gaza (2023).
In A Beach (2013) a series of photographs taken along the beach in the city of Jaffa/Tel Aviv, Israel/Palestine, are presented with a photograph from the same place by French photographer Félix Bonfils in 1880. The buildings that are visible in Bonfils’s photograph are now demolished to make way for a modern boardwalk. The construction is a process of gentrification by which Jaffa transforms into Tel Aviv and Palestine becomes Israel. The only signs left of the previous architecture are pieces of mosaic from floor tiles found on the beach in Jaffa, accompanied by writer Johannes Wahlström’s childhood memories.
In 2015, the artists extended the work into an enquiry on how a gallery context affects cultural heritage by giving it monetary value. When it was displayed at antique dealers in Stockholm and Paris, the floor tiles from A Beach were juxtaposed with exquisite objets d’art. They were accompanied by precise miniature replicas of the tiles, common for priceless artefacts.
Klara Källström & Thobias Fäldt and Johannes Wahlström, 2013-23
Book made together with 1:2:3 (Axel von Friesen and Petter Törnqvist), B-B-B-Books, 2013. Miniatures made by Maria Safronova Wahlström, 2015