Massive wall tapestry mimics piles of books at new National Library
Yael Cnaani’s pillow-like wall covers some 598 square yards, echoing building’s exterior stone walls
Jessica Steinberg, The Times of Israel's culture and lifestyles editor, covers the Sabra scene from south to north and back to the center
The soaring fabric work on the interior walls of the new National Library of Israel covers 565 square meters (598 square yards), making it the largest fabric wall sculpture in Israel.
Created by artist Gali Cnaani, the wall art is meant to mimic the massive exterior stone walls of the library, as well as hint at piles of books in the many horizontal and vertical lines of the fabric she designed.
The walls were inaugurated Tuesday night, as Cnaani, surrounded by friends and family, spoke about the new National Library building “as a kind of miracle and ray of light in the dark days” since the devastating Hamas attack of October 7.
The library was supposed to hold a formal opening on October 17 for its long-awaited, NIS 860 million ($225 million) building, across from the Knesset and the Israel Museum.
The official event was postponed after war erupted following Hamas’s October 7 massacre, when terrorists burst across the border into Israel from the Gaza Strip, murdering some 1,200 people and seizing 251.
Instead, the library opened unofficially several days later, on a limited basis, to readers and scholars, and was inundated with enthusiastic visitors.
Cnaani’s textile work was installed before the library opened, after she worked on the project for the last three and a half years.
She collaborated with Swiss architectural team Herzog & de Meuron and was in dialogue with Israeli architects from the Mann Shinar firm. She also worked with a German weaving company, local tailors and upholsterers to create the wall of pillow-like blocks that are covered in vertical and horizontal versions of the blue-lined and red-lined fabric.
Cnaani, a textile designer, researcher and curator with works exhibited in museums worldwide and in the collections of the Israel Museum and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, titled the work “A Mountain by the Side of the Road,” inspired by the poem “The Painter Paints” by Natan Zach.
She spoke about her initial ideas for the walls, relating to Jerusalem’s Old City walls and Western Wall, and to prayer shawls as well.
The Swiss architects were channeling Bedouin embroidery and Palestinian fabrics, but Cnaani was thinking about a puzzle of pillow-like blocks and ultimately referenced some of her earlier works, in creating the soft-edged blocks that looks like piles of books and form a wall-to-wall tapestry.
“It’s a copy of the walls outside,” said Cnaani. “And it’s soft fabric when most of the materials in the library are hard.”
The myriad blues of the fabric wall at the front of the library, in the building’s education wing, reference the calming blues of the Israeli sky, said Cnaani, while the reds and beiges of the back wall, in the library’s cafe, harken to the evening sunset and colors of the desert.
“It’s east and west,” said Cnaani, who was also thinking about the beiges and browns in the leaf edges of her own bookshelves at home. “It’s what feels familiar to us.”
