EITAN EFRAT & SIRAH FOIGHEL BRUTMANN - GATHERING SERIES

Sirah Foighel Brutmann (1983) and Eitan Efrat (1983) question the spatial and temporal potential when interpreting both moving and still photographic images. These two first chapters of the Gathering Series focus on two different public gathering places, namely places where you will find an amalgam of people: the memorial for Walter Benjamin in Portbou and a public sculpture in Tel Aviv commemorating the founder of the city, called White Square - both made by Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan. The first part of Nude Descending a Staircase (2015) – title borrowed from Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting - is a composition of clips found online that were made by visitors to the remote memorial site of Walter Benjamin in Portbou, Spain. The assembly of this audiovisual material transforms the autonomous experiences into one collective trajectory, and entangles collective memory, experience and the production of images. The second part reveals another staircase, abandoned and barricaded, on a small stage-like platform, outside the former Espai Memorial Walter Benjamin. The second staircase modestly suggests an alternative mode of framing memory. In the center of Orientation (2015), there is an environmental sculpture of white concrete situated on the highest point of Tel Aviv, a sculpture dedicated to the builders of the city – also called the White City. Orientation focuses on traces as signifiers of experiences – visible traces of children’s play on the white sculpture on one hand, and on the other, traces that are harder to spot, or that are invisible, untraceable, and that ask for speculations. So are the traces of the Palestinian village Salama, which was destroyed by the Israeli Army and depopulated from its native inhibitors, later re-inhabited by new Jewish immigrants, at the end of the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The two places – the sculpture and the village – situated 700m and more than half a century away from each other, brings together complex relations of influences and temporalities.

Gathering Series: Nude Descending a Staircase. 2015, video, 18'25”, colour, Hebrew spoken, English subtitles.
Gathering Series: Orientation. 2015, video, 12'47”, colour, Hebrew spoken, English subtitles.

Daily screened in loop from 11am to 6pm.