6 December 2008 – 14 February 2009

Blue Noses Group

1) 25 Short Performances about Globalism, 2003, video,10:05 min
2) If I Were Harry Potter, 2003, video, 7:40 min

3) Illustrated Headlines, video, 2004, 2:22 min

Anna Jermolaeva

1) Überlebensversuch, 2000, video, loop
2) Kurvenreich (Curvaceous), 2002, video, 3:00 min

3) Murka (Flower Bed), 2002, video, 1:00 min

4) Untitled, 2004, video, 1:00 min

5) Ass Peeping, 2003, video, 2:00 min

6) Regenschirmdemo, 2004-2006, video, 7:00 min

7) go…go… go… go…, 2005, video, 1:00 min

Provmyza (Galina Myznikova, Sergey Provorov)

The Slippery Mountain, 2006, video, 7:00 min


Victor Alimpiev

1) Sweet Nightingale, 2005, video, 6:44 min
2) Summer Lightning, 2004, video, 2:17 min

Vladimir Logutov

Episode, 2005, video, 1:00 min


Dmitri Gutov

Thaw, 2006, video, 3:40 min

Erbol Meldibekov

Pastan on the Street, 2005, video, 2:53 min

AES+F 

Who Wants to Live Forever, video, 1998, 6:25 min

Igor Guelman-Zak

1) Left to Right, 2007, video, 1:22 min
2) Tickling, 2007, interactive video

Nevet Yitzhak

Playground, 2007, 8-channel video concert, loop

Gili Avissar

Horse House Hat, 2008, 6-channel video installation, loop

Lior Waterman

1) Boudin, 2002, 12:00 min
2) Sweet Potato Man, 2007, video, 1:00 min
3) Presentation, 2002, video 2:00 min
4) Bababa, 2006, video, 1:00 min
5) Caruota, 2002, video, 1:00 min

Roy Menahem Markovitch

1) Untitled, 2008, video
2) Bicycle at the Park, 2007, video, 0:15 min
3) Rolling Stones, 2007, video, 0:50 min

Tom Pnini

Volcano Demo, 2008. video, 2:46 min

Haim Almoznino

1) Free Will, 2008, video, 1:43 min
2) Poetics of Destruction, 2008, video, 00:59 min

Ari Libsker

1. Election Day, Tel Aviv, 28 January 2003, video, 4:00 min
2. The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the Separation Wall is illegal, London, 23 February 2004, video, 2:29 min
3. One month and one day after the end of the Second Lebanon War, Accra, Ghana, 15 November 2006, video, 3:29 min
4. IDF Parade, Tel Aviv and Kibbutz Beit Alpha, Israel, 8 May 2008, video, 4:48 min

Tamar Ettun

1. Shemoneh Esreh Prayer (Eighteen Benedictions), 2008, video, 5:59 min
2) Shoot, 2007, video, 00:28 min
3) The 24th Floor, 2007, video, 04:00 min
4) Attempts, 2007, video, 9:49 min
5) Weathercock, 2007, video, 12:53 min

Yaron Atar & Ishay Gross

Rambo, 2007, video , 2:51 min

Yossi Atia & Itamar Rose

Missiles in Ramat Gan, 2006, video, 3:04 min 

Thanks to Guelman Gallery, Moscow and Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv

No Nonsense

Already at a purely formal level, the fact of beating up oneself renders clear the simple fact that the master is superfluous: 'Who needs you for terrorizing me? I can do it myself!'
-- Slavoj Žižek

The position described by scholar Slavoj Žižek in his reading of the film Fight Club emerges in the majority of video works featured in the exhibition. According to Slavoj Žižek, in the asymmetrical balance of power between the individual confronting a disciplining—whether political, economic, gender-related—power, the most effective protest is to turn the attack on oneself. Ostensibly defying all logic, such an act paralyzes and neutralizes any external means of intimidation which manifests powerlessness vis-a-vis a behavior identified as irrational. The artists participating in the exhibition adopt a similar tactic in addressing onerous, painful issues, by voluntarily assuming the figure of the idiot, the village fool, or the court jester, the nutty eccentric or the sideshow "freak." These marginal figures, operating outside the pale, are perceived as non-threatening, amusing, or grotesque. Therefore they are free to engage with the painful, the bleeding, the forbidden. This engagement often occurs on a nonverbal level, while using physical humor and impersonal, non-heroic, superfluous, and banal bodily gestures which put the performer or his performance in states of danger, violence, degradation, and ridicule.

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Featuring young Russian and Israeli artists, the exhibition at the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art pays homage to Russian-Israeli artist Igor Guelman-Zak. Guelman-Zak was born in Moldova in 1983. He immigrated to Israel in 1990 and graduated from the Midrasha School of Art at Beit Berl Academic College in 2005. Igor died in London in 2007.

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Ari Libsker presents four political speeches in which he "speaks to the people" on different occasions, such as on Election Day or during a trip to Africa. In these speeches, composed of meaningless texts interwoven with empty rhetoric, he performs in the public sphere, insisting upon making café patrons or bus passengers an attentive audience. The absurd situation, on the verge of harassment, elicits responses of embarrassment, silence, and avoidance on the part of the audience, in a brilliant satire of political demagoguery.
Yossi and Itamar masquerade as news reporters from some marginal, low-budget channel, trying to prepare an advance report about missiles falling on the city of Ramat Gan, in anticipation of a possible escalation in the security situation in Israel. They ask citizens to collaborate with them and pose as eyewitnesses. Initially shocked, people soon cooperate, reconstructing "authentic," familiar, and hackneyed reactions to the situation, thus creating a parody which examines the role of the media in structuring and interpreting reality.
Tom Pnini's video follows the residents of a typical suburban apartment building who unknowingly live at the foot of a volcano which seems to have landed on their rooftop. The surprising, absurd juxtaposition of the gray building and the lava-spewing volcano resembles the decor for a B- sci-fi movie, a backdrop where theatricality and an exotic fantasy come together to introduce a threat both metaphorical and real.
Roy Menachem Markovich too draws on the aesthetics of special effects in B-movies in three works which enact a situation, where the ground is pulled out from under the pastoral world he constructs. The three scenes, which appear to have been extracted from disaster movies—falling rocks in a landslide, chained bicycles falling by themselves, the ground breaking open in an earthquake—expose the ways in which the collapse effect was created, thereby neutralizing the horror while ridiculing the manipulation which generated it.
Rambo by Yaron Atar and Ishay Gross presents two young men seated on a sofa watching the film Rambo. In one of the film's climatic moments, when Sylvester Stallone pulls a bullet out of his muscular body, the two spectators get up and imitate his movements with blank automatic gestures. The two couch actors adopt a radicalized, exaggerated masculinity as a model of identification, which they imitate in a type of a grotesque coming-of-age ritual in the domestic living room.
Nevet Yitzhak creates a "concert" played across several screens, which she constructs from a myriad of everyday noises and sounds. The fastidious, advanced principles of non-mainstream music are dissonant with the images exposing the noises' mundane origins, mainly in children's toys and television channels, thus charging the high-brow soundtrack with humor, vivacity, and playfulness.
Gili Avissar creates a video collage spinning a theatrical story between several screens whose protagonists are a cowboy, a horse, and a clown. The use of heroic figures drawn from romance assumes an absurd effect due to the creative and frugal means by which he constructs the obscure, fragmentary story with a syntax oscillating between the theater of the absurd and a children's game.
Haim Almoznino blurs the line between the pranks of a risk-seeking teenage boy and the principles of creation and destruction, construction and deconstruction prevalent in the field of art history. Thus, in one work, he is shot riding a motorcycle "no hands" on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway, challenging the limits of danger in an act of rebellion, whereas in his other work we observe the destruction of an art work presented in a gallery—a carefully balanced tower—with a slight kick.
The two works by Igor Guelman-Zak address the interrelations between image and the human body. In one, he explores the futile discontent typical of the young generation today, which seems to be assuaged by means of ridiculously negligible cosmetic adjustments, as he switches between his right and left nipples. In his other work too, the order of things—this time between spectator and performer—is reversed, when the spectator is invited to tickle a pair of feet appearing on screen, thus, instead of the performer entertaining the viewer and making him laugh, the latter is invited to entertain the actor.
Lior Waterman presents four short films which push the limits of good taste while replacing the human body with inferior "substitutes." Even though the physical organs in the film are not "authentic," but rather vulgar substitutes such as vegetables and meat, the human body is present as an image and a metaphor for masculine virility. Employing props and humor, Waterman touches upon themes considered taboo by means of ridiculing and low-brow physical humor.
Tamar Ettun challenges the boundaries of bodily pain and danger, using the body as an inanimate object in everyday situations, a type of absurd sculpture obeying various physical laws. She sets ostensibly illogical or pointless goals for herself: distorting her body into a weather vane of sorts that spins on a rooftop; hanging from an electric pole; climbing up traffic signs in a hopeless attempt to remove pairs of shoes hanging from the trees; and performing as an acrobat without a safety net (and without audience).

Dalia Levin and Maya Shimony

Behind and Beyond the Absurd: A Few Historical Notes
Antonio Geusa (Independent curator & art critic based in Moscow)

Video entered the Russian art community as an artistic practice in the mid-1980s, twenty years after the technology had become available in the West. The main reason for the delay was the ban on all means of technical reproduction imposed by the Soviet authorities. When first video cameras and players appeared on the market, however, their high prices impeded their rapid diffusion. For about six years, video art was prerogative of a very few practitioners, ignored by the critics and unknown to the public at large. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought on a radical change. The opening of the first independent contemporary art spaces and the drop in prices of the equipment greatly favored the diffusion of video. In just a few months, video became a well-established practice.
It is at video, more than any other artistic medium, that we should look to get an uncompromised picture of how the permanent changes in the social, political, and economic structures of the whole country affected production and fruition of art. In other words, it is through video that we may perceive many of the defining traits of the post-Soviet artist. Artists appropriated video to (re)define both their identity and the relationship with the new type of public which was emerging, the unspecified "man on the street," a typology which was completely absent in Soviet times when secrecy was a necessary condition to avoid the Gulag.
Video was new the same way public access to contemporary art was in Russia. It came without any tradition to revolt against or conform to. Video gave artists the chance to voice their worries, their warnings, their messages of consolation addressed not only to Russia, but to the world. As a matter of fact, it is through video that Russian artists joined the global village.
Video was the territory of free experimentation, reflecting the new impulses and values experienced by art without being conditioned by the nascent art market. The underground—intended here as art nonconforming to state-imposed canons of Socialist Realism—had lost its reason to exist. New rules had to be written from scratch. Those were the years when the members of the Russian art community were teaching themselves new forms of contemporary art. For the first time, after decades of relegation into clandestinity, artists could speak out. They did so using video cameras. Moreover, from the second half of the 1990s, due to its ease in distribution, video helped many artists living outside Russia’s two cultural capitals—in places where art did not get any support—become known in Moscow or St. Petersburg, and from there abroad.
The program singles out one layer in the identity arising from the analysis of Russian video in recent years: that of the "idiot." Not intended in any pejorative sense, the "idiot" is probably the sanest person in the world; the only one who speaks the truth. His/her strange—at times comical, at times grotesque, at times near-irritating even—gestures reflect the absurdity inherent in our way of life. Behind and beyond their irrational behavior—which transcends any concept of geographical nationality—these artists conceal a profound revelation, that of being, despite everything, unrestrained by any political impositions and against the brutality of commodification. And they say this to us with a quirk smile on their faces.