Video and New-Media Focus

Curated by the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA): Bar Goren, Danielle Gorodenzik, Judith Lenglart, and Nicola Trezzi

The four works featured at the Video Focus of Freshpaint 2019 center on locations and sites, from familiar tourist attractions to unidentifiable places which convey a sense of non-place. Through these sites, the artists embark from a familiar place toward a personal, physical or symbolic journey. Using memories and stories – whether their own or those of other people – they bring the viewer into their experience.

In his video Untitled, Ariel Bernstein decides to leave the city to clear his head. He goes on a road trip across Israel, which turns into a journey of his personal traumas. Every encounter with a character or a landscape on theroad unfolds another layer ofhis internal investigation through associative memory. Gal Leshem’s work These Stones was created during her stay at an artists’ residency in Sofia, Bulgaria, and explores how collective memory is constructed in the public space through the genealogy of monuments in the city from the Communist era to today.

In his video Giverny Gardens, Sasha Tamarin takes a day trip to the gardens where Claude Monet lived and work. The site is packed with tourists leading Tamarin to focus on filming the visitors and his interaction with them. The visit becomes a kind of anthropological study, exploring the prevalence of technology in today’s tourist experience.

Reouth Keren’s video Haunting, Never, Touching is comprised of footage taken from security cameras scattered throughout different locations, which are accessible online. She creates a collage from the low-quality images where each site is detached from their historical and geographic context. As the images move across the screen, Keren reads texts aloud questioning the way images migrate on the internet.