WBC visits the Barbur Gallery – April 14, 2019

On the 14th of April, Masha Zusman hosted the Willy Brandt Center at the Barbur Gallery, of which she is co-founder and co-director. This was a follow up event, after Zusman had participated at our panel on International Women’s Day. The Gallery is an independent space for art and artists, and serves as a home for pluralistic, open culture at the center of Jerusalem.

In its 13 years of activity, Barbur Gallery has upheld a unique gallery model: it combines the exhibition of professional contemporary art along with diverse cultural, social and community programs directed at a range of different audiences – artists and art lovers, neighborhood residents and students, people from secular and religious backgrounds, children and the elderly.

Masha showed us the gallery’s current exhibition and talked about the gallery’s struggle for survival. The Jerusalem municipality has tried several times to shut down the gallery on administrative grounds. One of the questions arising in the discussion was if this could be a pretext for closing the gallery, and that the real reason behind the attempted eviction is political, since the gallery has hosted events with a range of political groups critical of the former mayor Nir Barkat and the Israeli right-wing Likud government.

This story of the Barbur Gallery thus illustrates how much pressure artists and galleries have to endure and the currents threats and restrictions aimed at the freedom of art and expression in Israel.