The Future of Temple Mount: Imagined Possibilities in Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli Art

Temple mount, or al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf, has long been the heart and crossroads of both Israeli and Palestinian concrete and imaginary geographies. The same place where today stand the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque and where the First and Second Jewish Temples (destroyed in the sixth century bce and first century ce, respectively) once stood has long fired the imagination, elicited multiple representations, and been the focus of much violence and friction. Therefore, it is unsurprising that in contemporary visions of the future of the region, this spatial knot of religious and political power has featured prominently. The two artworks I will focus on in this essay, Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate (2012) and Yael Bartana’s Inferno (2013), posit alternatives to the contemporary configuration of Temple Mount by entertaining the possibility of unlikely and improbable solutions to the question of how to share a place that is intrinsically indivisible.