Reservoir Dogs

Two artists in works about the boundaries between dream and reality, between  the animal and the human and between the psychological and the political.

Itay Marom's video "Dogs" was filmed in the dark and follows the nocturnal roaming of a pack of dogs on the border between Kiryat Arba and Hebron. In this area, replete with hostility between two populations, the dogs are a third, other kind of group.  As they wander freely, the infiltrating dogs succeed in making the viewers aware of another mode of existence.

"The Wolf Tree" motif, in various variations, was central to Michal Na'aman's work during the early 1990s. The wolf tree was drawn by Sergei Pankejeff ("the Wolf Man"), one of Freud's famous patients, to elucidate a dream he had as a child, in which a pack of white wolves appeared at night on a walnut tree. The night is part of the dream: "I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in bed…" as well as the reality outside of the dream: "I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time." The drawing of the tree with the wolves appears in the case study in Freud's writings. Appropriation or translocation of words or drawings from academic texts into her work is a common practice in Na'aman's work.

The terror in the Wolf Tree dream conceals something unbearable in the reality preceding it—the primal scene, in Freud's terminology; similarly, the dogs' nocturnal wanderings in the video conceal the reality of a conflict that is not shown in it.

*The title of the exhibition is taken from Quentin Tarantino's 1992 film.