Public art’s counter-temporalities, the case of the Garden Library, south Tel Aviv

In research on public art, there is a tendency to link art’s transformative potentialities to its temporal dimensions, namely duration, rhythm and the type of social relations they produce. However, beyond acknowledgement of what it might do, temporality received little conceptual attention. Using The Garden Library as a case study, this article foregrounds temporality as a theoretical and methodological framework to examine public art’s performative and structural patterns. The Garden Library is a multi-lingual and cultural space for refugees and migrant workers founded by the art group Arteam in the southern neighbourhood Neve Sha’anan, Tel Aviv in 2009. This article traces the project’s changing temporalities and considers how they create an inclusive time-space that is largely unavailable for the migrant communities living in Israel. It largely draws from art history and human geography scholarship to conceptualise time and temporality in relation to space, practice, and displacement and to further deepen our understating of the unique modes of knowledge and socio-political critique public art enables. The article also brings forth the entanglement of multiple oppressed temporalities, including native Palestinians and non-Jewish refugees, and reads the Garden Library against the background of Israel’s settler-colonial and ethnocratic state. Centring temporality, therefore, has two goals. The first is to examine the usage of time, alongside space, as a control mechanism and to draw links between shared experiences of dislocation and dispossession that are often studied separately. The second is to amplify the occasional collisions and intersections of marginalised temporal landscapes, including that of the Mizrahi (Arab-Jews) working class residents of Neve Sha’anan, and the possibility of such moments to produce counter-temporalities that adjust and resist forms of spatio-temporal power.