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Roee Rosen, Justine Frank, 2003
"Trembling Time: Recent Video from Israel at the Tate Modern", by Stuart Comer for Programma Magazine
Roee Rosen, Justine Frank, 2003
I was invited to Video Zone in 2007, the fourth International Video Biennial, which was organized by Sergio Edelsztein at the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Tel Aviv, with guest curators at other locations throughout Israel. I had been following the work of several Israeli artists who had been showing in London and on the international circuit, and this was an opportunity to take advantage of CCA’s substantial archive of time-based work and be introduced to artists who weren’t getting much exposure outside Israel. As Sergio and I continued meeting over the next two years at various international video festivals and panels, we decided to collaborate to present a survey of recent video work from Israel at Tate Modern.
Departing from some of the regional moving image surveys I’ve presented on work from Brazil, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, we decided to organize an intensive weekend program around three Israeli artists: Yael Bartana (whose work Kings of the Hill (2003) is in Tate’s Collection), Guy Ben Ner (who was in the Liverpool Biennial 2008) and Roee Rosen. Crucial to the program, the artists will attend the screenings and speak with audiences and each other to provide an in-depth understanding of the ideas and contexts that connect the work.
Video Zone has provided a forum in Tel Aviv for a wide range of artists working in video and enabled me to see different strands emerging from art practice in the region. Each of the featured artists in the Tate screening addresses a different trajectory within those strands. Guy Ben Ner deals with constructed performance, and, like many artists in Israel, explores issues of domestic life in the face of local tensions and politics. Yael Bartana’s more documentary approach deals with notions of the individual’s relationship to society, also a common theme in many of the videos I saw. Roee Rosen falls between the two with a tendency toward documentary that twists the whole idea of the genre, confounding conventional notions of fact and fiction, and his own identity as an artist, in a very playful way. These three artists serve as keystones to build the rest of the screening program, which features additional works from CCA’s archive that function almost as an ongoing public diary about life in Israel over the last decade.
People frequently ask me why video is so prevalent in the Middle East, but I think you can ask the same thing about Brazil or Eastern Europe or many places internationally where life and society and politics are constantly in flux. The speed and fluidity of digital images and the Internet have had massive consequences on how people understand the world at large and their own role within it. I think it’s interesting to consider that this work has been made as web-based video platforms like YouTube have emerged, encouraging a new, more public kind of confessional and performative culture. It’s fascinating to me how early video practices, like those of Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, anticipated some of the types of videos that can now be found on YouTube, and our shifting relationship to cameras and screens. It becomes harder to define what is documentary, what is art, and what function these images have.
Many of the recent Israeli videos we plan to show similarly function between the cracks, serving as a mirror on everyday situations in the country and their broader, political consequences. Having access to this work is like looking at a collective sketchbook, you really do get a sense of glimpsing Israel at some crucial and conditional moments. Decades from now I think it’s going to be enormously useful to view this work, it provides a very different function than a conventional documentary would. The questioning of individual roles and how one performs and is performed by the city and by the camera, all of these are crucial to see how identity is shifting within a specific political situation, how individuals shift that situation and how that situation shifts them.
Video is changing really quickly right now, shifting between the macro and the micro. In the 1960s and 1970s most video was monitor-based, then very quickly moved into installation practices. During the 1990s we saw Jane and Louise Wilson, Steve McQueen, Doug Aitken, and others doing large, multi-screen installations. But increasingly one sees a lot of artists returning to single-screen, monitor or Internet-based work; it isn’t always about major, large-scale installations.
Where and how video work should be shown remains an important and complex question. Often I don’t think it’s well served in a gallery setting, where one tends to walk through an exhibition fairly quickly. You need to spend time with it to get your head around the work. Therefore, screening programs like this are really useful to experience the work in a more concentrated manner and allow audiences to engage in a dialogue about both video and its relationship to broader cultural and political situations. Connections emerge when you watch clusters of work that open up more intensive discussions about the videos.
I am very wary of presenting programs according to nationality or region; it can be a risky endeavor. At the same time, if it’s done critically, I think it can be incredibly useful. The question of the diaspora is an important one globally, and obviously for Israel in particular. Many contemporary artists are involved in residency programs and living far away from their home bases. This has to be considered when presenting a video program about Israel - there’s a difference between representing a place and representing artists that come from that place.
Departing from some of the regional moving image surveys I’ve presented on work from Brazil, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, we decided to organize an intensive weekend program around three Israeli artists: Yael Bartana (whose work Kings of the Hill (2003) is in Tate’s Collection), Guy Ben Ner (who was in the Liverpool Biennial 2008) and Roee Rosen. Crucial to the program, the artists will attend the screenings and speak with audiences and each other to provide an in-depth understanding of the ideas and contexts that connect the work.
Video Zone has provided a forum in Tel Aviv for a wide range of artists working in video and enabled me to see different strands emerging from art practice in the region. Each of the featured artists in the Tate screening addresses a different trajectory within those strands. Guy Ben Ner deals with constructed performance, and, like many artists in Israel, explores issues of domestic life in the face of local tensions and politics. Yael Bartana’s more documentary approach deals with notions of the individual’s relationship to society, also a common theme in many of the videos I saw. Roee Rosen falls between the two with a tendency toward documentary that twists the whole idea of the genre, confounding conventional notions of fact and fiction, and his own identity as an artist, in a very playful way. These three artists serve as keystones to build the rest of the screening program, which features additional works from CCA’s archive that function almost as an ongoing public diary about life in Israel over the last decade.
People frequently ask me why video is so prevalent in the Middle East, but I think you can ask the same thing about Brazil or Eastern Europe or many places internationally where life and society and politics are constantly in flux. The speed and fluidity of digital images and the Internet have had massive consequences on how people understand the world at large and their own role within it. I think it’s interesting to consider that this work has been made as web-based video platforms like YouTube have emerged, encouraging a new, more public kind of confessional and performative culture. It’s fascinating to me how early video practices, like those of Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci, anticipated some of the types of videos that can now be found on YouTube, and our shifting relationship to cameras and screens. It becomes harder to define what is documentary, what is art, and what function these images have.
Many of the recent Israeli videos we plan to show similarly function between the cracks, serving as a mirror on everyday situations in the country and their broader, political consequences. Having access to this work is like looking at a collective sketchbook, you really do get a sense of glimpsing Israel at some crucial and conditional moments. Decades from now I think it’s going to be enormously useful to view this work, it provides a very different function than a conventional documentary would. The questioning of individual roles and how one performs and is performed by the city and by the camera, all of these are crucial to see how identity is shifting within a specific political situation, how individuals shift that situation and how that situation shifts them.
Video is changing really quickly right now, shifting between the macro and the micro. In the 1960s and 1970s most video was monitor-based, then very quickly moved into installation practices. During the 1990s we saw Jane and Louise Wilson, Steve McQueen, Doug Aitken, and others doing large, multi-screen installations. But increasingly one sees a lot of artists returning to single-screen, monitor or Internet-based work; it isn’t always about major, large-scale installations.
Where and how video work should be shown remains an important and complex question. Often I don’t think it’s well served in a gallery setting, where one tends to walk through an exhibition fairly quickly. You need to spend time with it to get your head around the work. Therefore, screening programs like this are really useful to experience the work in a more concentrated manner and allow audiences to engage in a dialogue about both video and its relationship to broader cultural and political situations. Connections emerge when you watch clusters of work that open up more intensive discussions about the videos.
I am very wary of presenting programs according to nationality or region; it can be a risky endeavor. At the same time, if it’s done critically, I think it can be incredibly useful. The question of the diaspora is an important one globally, and obviously for Israel in particular. Many contemporary artists are involved in residency programs and living far away from their home bases. This has to be considered when presenting a video program about Israel - there’s a difference between representing a place and representing artists that come from that place.
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