Bet Alpha wants to transform an existing architecture into a sequence of spaces created through screens and screens. Through the use of projections and film and video screenings, the physical reality of the place is hidden, literally shielded, but also brings to the fore the question of how an open and difficult to grasp historical-social reality can be accessed at all. Oscillating between documentary representation and elaborate fantasy, fiction and optical illusion, Bet Alpha repeatedly shows Pier Paolo Pasolini's documentary Site Visits in Palestine (Sopralloughi in Palestina) from 1963 at various points, made during the legendary filmmaker's preparations for his groundbreaking film The 1st Gospel - Matthew (Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo) from 1964. The documentary offers an original view of the then-fledgling land of Israel and conveys the director's reflections on the state of the biblical landscape as a melting pot of distant and recent pasts. 

The exhibition unfolds across a wide spectrum of projected structures in space, from cinema to video and recorded performance. It contains works by twenty artists with very different backgrounds. In the movement between the rooms, Bet Alpha itself becomes a kind of film that is irregularly cut and re-cut in real time depending on the visitors' movements. Bet Alpha moves back and forth between the real and the imaginary, the material and the virtual, through different forms of projection and display, as well as some sculptural interventions. These sculptural interventions represent the entirely material pole of Bet Alpha, anchoring the presentation in a physical ground that is continually abandoned and rediscovered.  

Bet Alpha amounts to an experience that transforms Villa Mautner-Jäger into a refuge, an enclave separated from its surroundings, the urban, communal fabric in which it is embedded. Bet Alpha treats the villa as a place for daydreaming, as a launching pad for events and situations that transcend and overcome the historical present - that is, the generally established, or rather ideologically hegemonic, everyday reality.   

Organized in collaboration with the Kira A. Princess of Prussia Foundation and curated by Ory Dessau.