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BLINDSPOTS
Video Installation, 2016 || Multi-channel HD, 4:00 minutes
The term “blind spots” is used in psychology to refer to the aspects of a personality that are not recognized by the person in question. The individual’s blindness to certain parts of themselves results in a difference between the self and the image others have of us. The site-specific projection on the bottom steps of stairs in front of a church provides insights into imaginary spaces that reveal the hidden and concealed. In the style of Expressionist silent film, fragments of dark and forbidden worlds are illuminated, whereby the lines separating madness and normality are fluid. In certain situations, blind spots can take on an essential protective function as defense and repression. -
SINKING LAND
| Video Installation, 2015 || Three Channel HD, 5:00 minutes loop |
With simple images and minimalist plot, this video installation, consisting of three projections, refers to complex territorial power struggles. Architecture is presented here as a strategy of political intervention and urban warfare. Against a backdrop of buildings of diverse origins and architectural styles, peaceful and violent scenes take place, including a demonstration and patrols that ultimately culminate in the downfall of the hybrid city-state and the violent clearing of the tent city in the foreground. The second large-format projection shows an expanse of water that can be associated with the final collapse of the state, with reference to the myth of the flooding of the belligerent island of Atlantis. In the unequal fight between two individuals, efforts at colonization continue in the foreground of the video. The third part of the work projected onto moving boxes concretizes territorial occupation as invisible strategy: pictures of luxurious villas of a formerly Palestinian part of Jerusalem are shown by Google Street View. -
MARKS OF EXISTENCE
| Video Installation, 2015 || Two Channel HD, 5:00 minutes loop |
This work in several parts refers directly to the history of the exhibition site. Jerusalem’s Hansen House was used from the late nineteenth century to the year 2000 as a hospital for leprosy patients and was then transformed into a public cultural center. Outcasts found asylum in this building, received protection and care. As bearers of an illness that was long considered incurable, they were also excluded from society, hidden behind walls and isolated, reduced to their bodies and their frailties by the power of the “clinical gaze” (Michel Foucault). References rich in association in the film and in projections on to the hospital interior evoke the site’s past and its patients. At the same time, the visitors to the exhibition are invited to cross the bridge between the past and the present and to become the object under examination. -
RESTRAINING MOTION
| Video Installation, 2014 || Two Channel HD, 5:00 minutes |
Restraining Motion studies the role of the individual in society. The representation of outer constraints and the revolt of the individual are picked up in a stylized choreography. Projected onto the broad façade of windows of a building on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, the filmic production looks like shadow theater for the audience and random passersby. In linking film and live performance, the work reveals tragic and comic elements. The performers are captured in an absurd work cycle by the repetition of movement. The conceptual starting point for the work lies in the ideas on social justice and pacifism of communist theorist and politician Rosa Luxemburg and her aphorism, “Those who do not move cannot feel their chains.” -
PARALYZED MOVEMENT
| Video Installation, 2014 || Single Channel HD, 5:00 minutes |
The work installed in public space depicts an absurd scenario. By showing two old soldiers in wheelchairs and their vain attempt at fighting against each other, the video becomes a parable for frozen, unresolved conflicts. The enemies have become paralyzed and are no longer able to approach one another. Except for a temporary uprising linked to scenarios of threat, they have nothing more to say to each other. Despite the realistic background showing a wall and a watchtower, the events become stylistically exaggerated: on the one hand by way of the theatrical performance, and on the other by the two circular frames through which the events can be watched as if through opera glasses. The fighting couple, visually separated and yet intractably linked to each other, is parodied by the interactive play of the shadows of the visitors to the installation, so that the scene acquires a theatrical note. -
OPEN | CLOSE
| Video Installation, 2014 || Single Channel HD, 3:43 Minutes |
The video deals with borders in their function as political and territorial markings and the violation thereof. Black, gridded shadows at the beginning of the work are revealed to be grilles, doors, and fences placed behind one another. They are slowly pushed to the side with a metallic squeak to reveal the view of a border crossing. Here, a security official examines the bags and passports of those waiting, then allows them to cross. At borders that serve to mark cultural differences, there are different emigration laws depending on nationality, appearance, religious background, and language. By locating the scene specifically at Lion’s Gate, one of the many accesses to the fortified old city of Jerusalem, through which trade was carried out, where people arrived in the city, and the Israeli Army passed through in the Six-Day War (1967), the border in the video stands as a synonym for the clash between strategies of security, the experience of a lack of freedom, and enduring armed conflicts. -
IS THIS A GOOD DAY TO START A WAR
| Video Installation, 2009 || Single Channel DVD, 10:30 minutes |
The video is created from Silhouette images of actors who are placed in a virtual environment. The work is inspired by both realities and cyberspace; the icons are created inside a flat but layered landscape, the figures are shadows of a violent action. Silhouettes of a high-rise building skyline by night, blue smoke clouds and a small group of people with Mickey Mouse ears, who are playfully swiping at or perhaps actually punching each other. Above the scenery, the light beams of military helicopters are circling coolly and quietly. The work explores the moment before a fight begins, the time for exercising, building up and imitating an imaginary battle scenario, the simulation of a war that might happen. .
Sharon Paz
Artist