co-juror and co-curator of the video greenhouse fresh paint art fair #9, tel aviv 

The six works selected for Fresh Paint 9 Video Greenhouse explore concepts of digital culture, nature, and the home environment. The works investigate different relationships, connections and tensions between these concepts, and their impact on our lives.

 

Feed is a work by Liliana Farber that plays with the digital language through a combination of common applications and photos; the cross between these two worlds creates a pixilated image that is at first incomprehensible and can only be recognized through the motion of the application. Thus, Farber criticizes the very position that technology holds in our everyday lives.

 

The Battle Over is a video by Barak Rubin in which he uses technology to take apart an Assyrian relief, and reconstruct a new narrative. The relief, which is known to the audience from the documentation of recent ISIS destructive actions in Syria and Iraq, raises questions about representations of violence and war throughout history - starting from that same ancient Assyrian relief and all the way to the internet and video representations of violence in recent years.

 

Hedgerow 25FT (Literally in Hebrew: Living Hedge)[a2] by Netta Laufer appropriates a commonly used surveillance system in Israeli army war rooms near the border for tracking human activity. However, in this work, the system is not used as a political control mechanism. Instead of tracking people, the cameras track the landscape and animal life. This discrepancy raises questions about how power relations are linked to this technology. The absence of human figures from these photographs, despite an expectation to find people there, brings forth their absent-present existence.

 

In the work Wild Animals, Yarden Taub uses the clichéd aesthetic of the bourgeois home juxtaposed by a text by American activist and writer Edward Abbey used to criticize the isolation and remoteness from man and nature. Taub shows this distance by creating a fantasy world where nature bursts back into our lives and creates a place of wildlife.

 

Crossing the Dune by Elham Rokni is a different technique for externalizing our misunderstanding of nature. This video illustrates the absurdity of attempting to ride a bike on planks over a dune. The work AA by Michael Liani conveys the complexity of home as a concept. Three characters in the video bring to the surface the tension between signifiers of tradition and a personal search for identity and sexuality.

 

Curated by CCA, The Center for Contemporary Art, Nicola Trezzi, Danielle Gorodenzik, Judith Lenglart and Bar Goren. Supported by Outset Israel. 

(March 2017)

artists

Elham Rokni, Crossing the Dune

 

Michael Liani, AA

 

Barak Rubin, The Battle Over

 

Netta Laufer, Hedgerow 25FT

 

Yarden Taub, Wild Animals

 

Liliana Farber, Feed