Triple Knesset, 2008

Triple Knesset began while I was working with the Leni and Herbert Sonnenfeld photographic archive for the exhibition Never Looked Better at Beit Hatfutsot in Tel Aviv in 2008.

While going through the archive, I came across photographs that had been taken inside the Israeli parliament. I remember looking at them and being confused. I had grown up in Israel and knew the Knesset building in Givat Ram very well from television, newspapers and public life, but the rooms in these photographs looked completely unfamiliar to me. I could not understand where they had been taken.I began to investigate the history of the Knesset buildings and discovered something that had never really entered my own image of the institution: before moving to its permanent building in Givat Ram in 1966, the Knesset had existed in several temporary locations.

In Tel Aviv, parliamentary meetings had taken place in the former Kessem Cinema. The building had already passed through different functions before becoming associated with the parliament, and afterwards it changed again. It was later used by the municipality and by the Israeli Opera, and eventually demolished. Today the site is occupied by the Opera Tower, a commercial and residential complex. Standing there, it was almost impossible to imagine that this had once been a place in which the political life of the new state was conducted.

The second location I photographed was Froumine House on King George Street in Jerusalem. The Knesset met there from 1950 until 1966. By the time I photographed it in 2008, the parliament had long since moved away. The building had been used for other governmental and religious functions, and its former parliamentary identity was difficult to recognise. Again I was confronted with the strange disappearance of an important political history from the appearance of the place itself.

The third location was the present Knesset in Givat Ram. Here the situation was completely different. The building had been designed specifically as a parliament, and its architecture had become inseparable from the institution. For me, this was the Knesset I had always known.

I realised that what interested me was not only the history of these buildings, but the way my own memory had been formed. I had grown up inside Israeli society, yet the earlier architectural history of the parliament had somehow remained invisible to me. The archive revealed a gap between historical events and the images through which I had learned to recognise them.