The Floodgates Within: Video Art from Israel

Chen Tamir, Curator at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv, will present two evenings of video from Israel. Designed to complement one another, these two events will situate Israeli contemporary art within historic, social, and political contexts, and offer a wide overview of experimental video-based art from this unique and fraught country.

June 7, at 6 pm at the Auditorium of NGA

Opening the Floodgates: The Development of Israeli Video Art from the 1990s to Today

This evening event will include a historical survey of video art from Israel and situate it within a greater social and cultural context. Chen Tamir will discuss how the liberalizing of the economy radically changed in the 1980s and 1990s and how this spurred developments in the mass media and technology that greatly affected contemporary art in Israel.

Doron Solomons
My Collected Silences, 1996, 4:00"

Doron Solomons was one of the first artists in Israel to use video as a primary medium. During the day, he worked as a television newsroom editor, which supplied him with the raw material for his first work, My Collected Silences. For this short video, Solomons stitched together bits of silence from news interviews. As viewers, we can only surmise what came before or after; we are left simply with anticipation, a void. Since making this early piece, Solomons has developed several works that explore eloquent silence and that take inventory of the banal moments of daily life within social and political contexts.

Yael Bartana
Trembling Time, 2001, 6:20"

Yael Bartana is perhaps Israel's most well known video artists and Trembling Time is her most famous early work. Like the rest of her oeuvre, it explores the shared cultural rituals that help make up national identity. Each year throughout Israel sirens are rung for two minutes to observe Memorial Day. Even those driving on the highway stop and stand solemnly in silence. Bartana filmed this phenomenon from a bridge and manipulated the footage progressively as the traffic came slowly to a standstill, layering the images and creating a haunting sound.

Guy Ben Ner
Moby Dick, 2000, 12:39"

Guy Ben Ner is known for re-staging literary masterpieces within his domestic home settings, using his family as cast along with minimal everyday objects as props. In this famous work, he and his daughter comically reenact the classic tale of a vengeful captain in pursuit of a great white whale, within the modest confines of their kitchen. The result is a playful example of the resourcefulness that video allows artists, and also of how personal life is shaped by larger cultural phenomena and vice versa.

Roee Rosen
Two Women and a Man, 2005, 16:15"

In Two Women and a Man, Roee Rosen presents the story of surrealist artist Justine Frank, as told by researcher Ann Kastroff. Although Frank was anti-Zionist, she found herself in Israel in the 1930s as a marginal, radical, feminist outsider who was influenced by George Bataille and the false messianic movement of the Middle Ages called Sabbateanism. Two Women and a Man is one of Roee Rosen's earliest examples in which a liberal and confusing use of fiction is intertwined with strong female character creations.

Nir Evron
A Free Moment, 2011, 4:00"

The video consists of one pre-programmed robotic shot using a 35mm film camera mounted on a unique motion-control head. Following a single-track dolly, the camera's choreography is composed of three simultaneous rotations that together pan a fascinating structure: the Tell el-Ful castle. Located on a hill in northeast Jerusalem, the castle was commissioned by King Hussein of Jordan in 1966, but its construction was halted by the 1967 Six Day war during which Israeli forces battled Jordanians on this very hill. Now resembling a ruin, the shell of the castle overlooks Jerusalem's old city, the Israeli settlement Pisgat-Ze'ev, Palestinian Authority areas including Ramalla and almost the width of the State of Israel, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean. A work of cinematic elegance, A Free Moment is an example of the sophistication that video art has reached in recent years, and the ongoing interest Israelis have in their fraught socio-political landscape, and the radical changes that have taken place during its short and violent history.

 

June 8, at 6 pm at the Auditorium of NGA

Within Me: Embodying Conflict and Militarization in Contemporary Israeli Video

The second evening event will include a screening of work by a dozen of Israel's most exciting contemporary artists, followed by a roundtable discussion with Chen Tamir, who will focus on Israel's unique social and political contexts and how they are at play in video work created in Israel today, as well as the power art might have in such contested fields.

Boaz Arad and Miki Kratsman
21:40, 2002, 6:03"

For 21:40, Arad and Kratsman, two of Israel's most established artists, asked people to reenact the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was killed in 1995. Stopping people on the street where Rabin was shot, the artists probe collective memory by looking for the similarities and discrepancies in each person's account. Participants reenact the scene, lending their own bodies to the tale and physically identifying with the protagonists who so markedly shaped Israeli life ever since. 

Ruti Sela
Pride Parade, 2005, 3:00"

Israeli society is becoming increasingly religious and right wing, and nowhere is that felt more than in Jerusalem. In 2002, a small group of LGBTQ activists put on the first parade, but were met with virulent opposition by ultra religious Jews and Muslims as the parade grew each year. In 2005, a religious Jew stabbed three parade participants, and the event has been plagued with hindrances ever since. In this work, Sela films the religious opposition as they attempt to turn the Pride Parade into a Shame Parade, and ironically come to embody and display the shame they themselves attempt to cast on the LGBTQ community.

Itamar Rose
Arafat Visits Sderot, 2012, 5:40"

Rose is known for creating absurd situations and asking people to play along. In this work, he asked inhabitants of Sderot, an Israeli town just north of Gaza that is often the target of Hamas shelling, to pretend to be Palestinians. Their responses reflect the inherent fear and racism in Israeli society, but also offer a glimmer of hope for mutual understanding. 

Rinat Kotler
Super Tiger, 2009, 6:00"

Playing in a park on a bright day, the children in Super Tiger were pandering to the camera when a loud of-camera blast was heard, caused by a children's explosive toy, a tiny "bomb." They process this event by re-enacting reportage to the camera, pretending to be the newscasters they are surely accustomed to hearing on a daily basis. The presence of the camera gives them license to simultaneously imagine a fictive scenario and live out a real one.

Raafat Hattab
Bidun Enwan/Untitled, 2009, 4:06" 

Bidun Enwan/Untitled begins with a man drawing water in slow dramatized footage, and proceeding to water and reverently tend to an olive tree. The video slowly pans out and we see that this action takes place in Rabin Square, in front of the Tel Aviv Municipality, and the water was drawn from the nearby public fountain. The olive tree is a potent symbol for peace in Israel, and also one for conflict as many Palestinian olive groves have been set on fire in recent years by Jewish settlers. With this work, Hattab brings up questions of individual versus shared responsibility, the cultivation of peace, and the poetics and complexities of place.

Dor Guez
Watermelons Under the Bed, 2010, 8:00"

Dor Guez comes from a mixed Christian Palestinian and Jewish Israeli family and his work is always intimate and revolves around personal identity. In this work, he interviews his family about how they negotiate their ethnicity within the larger Jewish majority. The major motifs in the video are the "sabra" cactus fruit and the watermelon, both native to the region and adopted as symbols of Israeli identity.

Malki Tesler
Dirt, 2011, 3:04"

Tesler highlights everyday violence through simple defiant acts. In Dirt, Tesler strews plastic dishware on a street in Tel Aviv while a street cleaner picks up after her. In Israel, most cleaners are elderly Ethiopian men, who are very poor and cannot integrate into society for lack of language and education. 

Roy Menachem Markovich
And We Worked, 2011, 10:00"

In And We Worked, the artist films his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, trying to recount her Holocaust experience, but is constantly interrupted. She is later honored by two soldiers who come to pay tribute, but their interest is also token; they too see Holocaust stories as a form of entertainment.


Chen Tamir is Curator at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel-Aviv and also serves as Associate Director of Artis. Her previous positions include Executive Director of Flux Factory and Program Associate at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.  She holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College and her exhibitions have been presented at venues including Art in General and White Box in New York; Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, National Gallery of Saskatchewan, University of Toronto, and Gallery TPW in Canada, and the Israeli Center for Digital Art and Museums of Bat Yam in Israel.

Films with English subtitles, lectures and discussion - in English.
Entrance is free of charge.

Supported by Culture Council (Lithuania)

Contact for information Živilė Etevičiūtė ph. (8 5) 2195965, zivile@ndg.lt

Image: still from film by Nir Evron 'A Free Moment' (2011)

 

NGA Auditorium
2016 06 07

18.00

Izraelio_video

On June 7-8 National Gallery of Arts presents the program of contemporary Isreali video art 'The Floodgates Within: Video Art from Israel' curated by Chen Tamir, Curator at the Center for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv.