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Curating in Jerusalem means curating in a region of crisis. In October this year, at the time I arrived to work on the Jerusalem Show 2009: Jerusalem Syndrome, two conflicts continued to smoulder: the violent clashes after the provocative prayers of Jewish believers at the Temple Mount close to the al-Aqsa mosque, which is only permitted for Muslim worship, and the confiscations of Palestinian homes in the residential area of Sheikh Jarrah. Under normal circumstances, Jerusalem is already a highly competive and conflictual city, but these incidents resulted in an even greater police and military and raised general tensions. On the doorsteps of the Austrian Hospice in the Old City, where I stayed, Israeli soldiers hanging around day and night, blocking the entrance. The building is located on the main street to the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, where new clashes were expected.In this situation, curating an annual large-scale art exhibition in the Old City, initiated by a Palestinian institution, Al Ma’mal, was an almost impossible undertaking. At the same time it can be considered an enormous act of emancipation. One of my concerns with the Jerusalem Show was to connect the Palestinian Territories, and above all the city of Jerusalem with the art world of the Middle East. The format of the show, because of the short period of ten days, is a midway between that of a biennial and a festival, an integral part of which is the daily program of screenings, performances, guided tours and other events.The first two editions of the Jerusalem Show were curated by Jack Persekian, who launched the project in 2007. When he invited me to be a co-curator for the Jerusalem Show in 2009, the idea was to integrate a perspective from the outsider. My former experiences in Israel and Palestine – I had participated in the project Liminal Spaces, taught at the Art Academy in Ramallah and traveling to Tel Aviv and Ramallah several times for lectures, conferences and a curator residency – were tremendously helpful for me. It made me realize how much the parameters of curating shift when you work within an occupied territory. I quickly learned that the informal contacts are the necessary starting point for curating an exhibition in a Palestinian institution in Jerusalem. Using your contacts that are built over a long time on credibility, kinship and trust is essential in this process. For example, acquiring the eight different venues for the Jerusalem Show as well as securing the locations of artworks in public space have only been possible by activating mainly private networks. Since most, if not most, local artists in Palestine more or less directly comment on the daily hardships of occupation, my interest was in the differents and similarities of these artistic strategies in Palestine and the region and artworks that discuss the occupation from a different perspective or or that offer an outsider’s of Jerusalem and Palestine. For example, Raouf Haj-Yahia’s video Cinderella Zero, 2009, deals with the entanglement of basic human needs with politics and the role of the media in occupied Palestine, while Ayreen Anastas’ & Rene Gabri’s four channel videopiece Case Sensitive America (2008/2009), discusses the state of human rights and individual freedom in Guantanamo Bay. Or Kajsa Dahlberg, whose Greetings from Jerusalem 22/4/1911 – 18/8/2007 (2009), consists of a collection of postcards that Swedish tourists sent from Jerusalem sent home to Sweden. The personal messages on this card showed unintentionally show how the political, territorial and religious conflicts of Jerusalem must compete with the overwhelming beauty of the city and its compelling history. The title of the exhibition, Jerusalem Syndrome, served us as a metaphor for approaching the many facets of a contested city divided by occupation and ethnic-religious segregation. The city of Jerusalem is characterized by the concentration of diversity and its conflicts, which are simultaniously spiritual, political and territorial. Nowhere else do you find such a unique concentration of history and sacred sites than in the Holy City. Every year, some fifty to two hundred travelers, pilgrims and tourists, are overwhelmed by the so-called ‘Jerusalem Syndrome’. Believing they are the Virgin Mary or the Messiah, they walk around the city, trying to spread the news of their palingenesis or the apocalypse – before they are taken to the state psychriatic ward. The Jerusalem Syndrome stands for both enlightenment and collapse; it is the strongest effect Jerusalem can have on the personality of a visitor. The madness and illusion of being chosen also characterizes the relations of religion and power, in particular when the historical importance of religious sites are cited to legitimate territorial claims over the city. For us, the metaphoric title Jerusalem Syndrome served as an entry for individual approaches to the Old City, exploring its enclaves, wandering its labyrinths, and telling its stories from multiple points of view.The psychological aspects of the occupation were very present in the exhibition, not only in the works show, but also during the production process: artists got stuck at check-points and artworks were held at borders, and one artwork could’t get through at all: we had to live-broadcast Tarek Atoui’s performance Un-drum / Strategies of Surviving Noise via a video conference connection, because with a Lebanon passport he is denied entry to Israel. Looking back on the project, what impressed me the most was the fact that the strategy of informal economies is becoming a more and more essential part of curating in many regions that became finaly part of the ‘globalised art world’. After all, there are many different kinds of crisis, be it occupation and societal control, state bankruptcy, general budget cuts in the cultural field or neo-liberal funding policies. Nina Möntmann is curator and Professor for Art Theory and the History of Ideas at the Royal University College for Fine Arts in Stockholm