Through a Balcony: video screenings throughout TLV

As of Sunday, April 26, 2020, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which is currently closed to visitors, will breach its boundaries and enter the physical domain.

The Museum will screen a selection of video works on the walls of buildings, visible from windows and balconies. Screenings will be held in the evenings, at various locations throughout the city of Tel Aviv —announcements of the screenings and locations will be sent to residents.

Going out into the physical domain is part of a broad initiative of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which draws a spotlight on the Israeli art field. Screening video work from the Museum's collection in the urban space illuminates the nomadic capacity of this non-material medium, and its ability to realize its appearance on a platform different from the gallery walls. The works presented stemmed from various creative bodies and thinking processes of artists, and yet it is difficult not to point out the thread weaved between them. In many of the works it is possible to identify a mechanism and its disruption, the use of agreed visual linguistic signs in the culture and the examination of the position of the human body in relation to the political and the personal. Re-reading the works by projecting them onto the walls of the naked city, at this time, may reload them or reinforce the traumatic nucleus inherent in each of them.

About the works:

Ben Hagari, Invert, 2010
The work is based on the technological logic of celluloid, which puts two modes of appearance into the image: positive and negative. Ben Hagari, the artist, portrays a character who emerges into an inverted world and tries to understand its new laws through trying to teach a parrot to speak. The film was shot in 35mm to directly project the negative of the film. Instead of the regular positive development, the actual set was reversed, with the color, the decor and the character’s makeup. For instance: red becomes green, yellow turns into violet, and the light areas into shade. Also the new words the artist’s character tries to teach the parrot are said upside down, examining whether reality is being loaded with a new meaning: the two stable words that are likely to survive inversion, shock or disruption are sun and mother, unquestionable entities of warmth.

Raafat Hattab, Untitled, 2009
Artist Raafat Hattab, pumps water and waters and olive tree with the song "Love" in the background (by the Lebanese singer Ahmad Kaabour). The local looks, the deep connection to the land and the olive tree as the national symbol of the Palestinian village, goes awry as the video camera zooms out and reveals that the olive tree and Hattab are in the center of Rabin Square. The point of view instantly converts the planted into the displaced.

Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, Call Me Your Bastard, 2002
Artist Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, captures the image of the fire signs associated with ceremonial activities of youth movements, and transfers it from the public and national space to the private and emotional space. The fire sign creates an image of a burning heart, an endless loop of a kind of "eternal fire", of combustion without beginning and end. The ceremonial pathos of the fire sign reinforces the sense of "togetherness" in the public, adopted for an image of loneliness and private pain.

Alona Rodeh, Barking Dogs Don't Bite, 2012
The work consists of two parts - day and night. Both feature an empty commercial gallery space. An unknown mechanism operates within the gallery space, a cycle in which a smoke bomb is thrown into the space from an unknown source, followed by the commercial / urban defense mechanisms designed to address this threatening scenario. The performative presence of the orchestrated defense mechanisms is not interrupted by anyone and does not merit the gaze of bystanders passing the gallery without noticing what is happening. The viewer appears to be the only witness to the unfolding drama.

Gilad Ratman, The Days of the Family Bell, 2012
Inspired by a cinematic ploy invented by Spanish film pioneer, Segundo de Chomon in 1907, The Days of the Family Bell was filmed using a camera mounted to the ceiling while the actors lay on a black carpet underneath it. The video refers to the congestion that occurs in every performative action that integrates and constitutes the body. Through dance theatre, wrestling and acrobatics associations, the question of the search for the balance of social structures arises.