In the autumn of 2020, the artist Hadasa Goldvicht began documenting the storage floors of the National Library in Jerusalem, as the library prepared, after decades, to move to its new location. Over the course of nearly three years, Goldvicht interviewed library staff and recorded the gradual emptying of the stacks—the millions of books were slowly packed away, and the workers themselves gradually departed to the new building.

Goldvicht’s book, To The Internal Libraries / Biblioscopia, explores personal and collective reservoirs of knowledge, as well as themes of body, language, and time—while telling a bigger story about pain and healing. The book includes interviews with library employees speaking of the evolution of their work processes throughout decades of working in the library, their relationship with readers, and the role the library plays in their lives.

​

In the concluding conversation of the book, Goldvicht speaks with Dr. Efrat Suraqui, a rehabilitation physician, about the library as metaphor, as well as personal and collective journeys of healing, and about the “inner libraries” and embodied knowledge we carry within us.

The invisible network of trajectories, which for over 60 years carried millions of books from the basement of the National Library on Givat Ram to those awaiting them in the reading rooms, is revealed in the video installation by artist Hadassa Goldvicht, which captures the overall experience of the Library. Like a Russian nesting doll that contains within it a series of increasingly smaller dolls, “To the Internal Libraries” contains not only the previous incarnation of the National Library of Israel, but also its personal, physical and spiritual incarnation in the present, and even those awaiting us in the future.

Goldvicht’s dive into the depths of the building presents the Library as a living, pulsating, evolving body, which was taken apart only to be reincarnated again. In doing so, her work is revealed as a journey through time, from the Jewish National University Library to its present incarnation as the National Library of Israel, and on to the tremendous potential embedded in its future. It is a journey that alludes to the infinite nature of human spirit and imagination, as embodied by the Library.

 

Curators: Netta Assaf
Associate curator: Karine Shabtai