“Maybe, Maybe Not,” the sprawling large-scale exhibition by Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, has no true beginning or end. Like the artist himself, it refuses to be constrained. Fourteen-ton iron trees erupt from the museum grounds, millions of hand-painted seeds blanket the floors of the interior and frieze-like swirls on the walls mask commentaries on the internet-age trifecta of censorship, social media and government surveillance.
At one end of the exhibit, a low-volume video of a restless caged tiger plays on a loop. This tiger, Laziz, was the last surviving tiger in what animal activists and the media called the “World’s Worst Zoo,” located in Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, before its abrupt closure in 2016. When Ai visited it on a trip to Gaza last year, he found that so many of the animals had died of starvation that zookeepers had resorted to displaying stuffed carcasses in the cages.
