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| "The New Terrorism", 2006 video / audio Installation 11min 27sec The "The new terrorism" is an educational kit for American schools from the 1970’s. It consists of a strip of photo slides, a one-sided record, a booklet and a game. Using examples of current affairs at the time, the kit was used to teach high school kids about the threat of terrorism. In my work I recorded the film strip with a video recorder and slowed the footage so the slide show would match the exact length of the album. When played simultaneously the two resources do not synchronise. This de-synchronisation interrupts and suspends the viewer’s reading of the footage. The meaning of the document escapes its original educational- and sensational-intention and the process of creating certain historical narratives becomes evident. |
"The New Terrorism", 2006 video / audio Installation 11min 27sec |
"The déjà vu of Avner Kaufmann", 2006, video Parallel screening of Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and Michael Anderson’s "Sword of Gideon" in B-Books, Berlin 2006. In his new movie "Munich", currently showing in cinemas across Germany Steven Spielberg deals with one of the more sensitive issues in the new Jewish/ Israeli history - the terror attack from the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich where eleven Israeli athletes were killed by the members of the Palestinian group, Black September. The story of the movie revolves around the character of Avner Kaufmann, an Israeli military officer who is personally recruited to the mossad by then Prime Minister Golda Meir to lead the spy team who will avenge the terror attack and will kill the terrorist involved in the attack. Twenty years ago, HBO produced a television movie about the same historical events. The thriller film, "Sword of Gideon", also focuses on an Israeli agent named Avner who faces a similar crisis of conscience as Spielberg’s Avner and is wracked by guilt after helping assassinate Palestinians believed to be behind the Munich slayings. Both movies are based on the same 1984 book, "Vengeance", by Canadian author George Jonas. But there are some scenes in the new movie that are staged very similarly to those in the older movie. For example, in recreating the bloody last moments of the Munich crisis, when Palestinians fire on Israeli Olympians held captive in a helicopter, both movies use the same camera angle -- from the perspective of the hostages. And both "Sword" and "Munich" feature a noteworthy scene that doesn’t appear in the book: a shot of a pensive Avner picking up the tobacco pipe of a fallen team member in a London hotel room. Remaking movies and directors ripping each other off is not a new phenomenon in the movie industry. Munich’s case, though, is, to my opinion, more interesting because of Spielberg’s attempt to show his take on world terror and his original position as a Zionist Jew while, actually, making a movie that had already been done and denying even seeing it. Through the parallel screening, a situation occurs where cinematographic mechanisms become transparent and new connections emerge. For example, some scenes in one movie function as a cinematic visualization of a dialogue in the other. What becomes interesting are the subtle readings that arise when the two films are screened together, namely, Spielberg’s kitchified simulacra take on the representation of terror. This results in a kind of "déjà vu" that underlines society’s tendency to emotionally frame ideas of terror and justice. Munich’s introductory claim, that it is "inspired by real events", situates the idea of "déjà vu" within the context that the two movies share. |
Keep it real 3 videos project, 2005 The works document three young rappers who are trying to achieve success in the hip hop industry. In the videos, Nymesis, Blind Fury and P-Star tell their stories, present their agendas, talk about the way they are trying to position themselves in the hip hop game and demonstrate their artistic skills. Nymesis video 11min 38sec Nemesis is 19 years old and lives in Harlem NY. He goes daily to the street corner in 125th and St Nicholas Ave. where he and his friends sell cigarettes in the black market for a living. He Battle Raps occasionally with the bypassers who dare to battle him. |
Keep it real 3 videos project, 2005 Stephen Norris a.k.a Blind Fury video 11min Stephan is 21 years old. He was born blind, grew up in Camden, South Carolina. He has rhymed since he was 9. A few years ago he started to rap and battle in the local club scene where he met his friend DJ Mellow. Mellow contacted his friends DJ spice & Darrell Jones from NY, They believed in Fury’s potential and decided to produce him under their production company 3 wise men. Blind Fury made the finals on MTV’s "mc battle" award and came in the third of the top five in the country, he is performing nation wide and is currently working on his first E.P., |
Keep it real 3 videos project, 2005 Pricilla Dies a.k.a P-Star video 29min 52sec Priscilla is 19 years old. She started to rap when she was 7. She lives in Harlem NY with her older sister and her father Jesse who is also her producer. P-Star has been filmed by a few hip hop DVD magazines in NY, performed in different clubs in the city, won 8 beauty pageant competitions and she is about to sign on a major Music label. |
"How to convert a scientific problem into a banal love story", 2005 video/audio installation loop The work is based on the science fiction film Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky that was made after a novel by Stanislaw Lem. The film centres on a group of research astronauts who spend very long periods of time in space in order to study the mysterious star Solaris and have to confront their consciences by meeting, in reality, characters from their memories. Out of longing to home- planet earth--they fix a piece of paper cut to strips onto the spaceship vents because the sound it makes reminds them of trees moving in the wind. In my work I rebuilt the paper installation and filmed it with a super 8 camera that records no sound. Next to the film production I installed a record player that repeatedly played a record called "wind in trees" which is a recorded sound of the wind blowing in the trees (The record was pressed in the 70’s and was used for therapy purposes.) The sound and the film are played simultaneously but are only become synchronised at random moments. When the sound and the image meet there is an illusion that the sound comes from the vent blowing the paper. The title of the work refers to one of the astronauts who tells the main character, after seeing his dead wife and falling in love with her that he shouldn’t make a banal love story out of a scientific problem. |
"How to convert a scientific problem into a banal love story", 2005 video/audio installation loop |
"There is nothing here but the recordings", 2005 video 8min 44sec The work is a video documentary about Avi Yaffe, an Israeli sound technician who served as a soldier in the Suez Canal during the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Yaffe brought his recording device with him to the bunker on the Suez Canal front where he was positioned because he wanted to play music to his friends and maybe to record some sounds. He ended up recording the first seven hours of an ambush in a war that none of the Israelis knew was going to start. His material is unique as a document as no other journalists or news reporters could make it to the front. His footage has never been fully published. In the video he tells the story of his experience in the war and the experience of recording a war while samples of the footage are playing. The video subtitles the footage in English. When Avi Yaffe is speaking in the interview, the screen is blank and his words are documented in English subtitles. The recordings show the trauma that lies in the aural memory of war. In opposition to the official propagandist victory recordings that exist of the 1967 war in Isreal, Yaffe’s voice and ears serve as a requiem for the end of a period of almost euphoric national pride in Isreal. |
"Keiner schiebt uns weg", 2005 video\audio installation 14min 03sec In 1981, after over three years of political struggle and a successful outcome, a record that documented the activity of 29 women who fought for equal rights in their company called "Heinze photo druck und papier" in Gelsenkirchen was pressed. The workers union released the record. On the record one can hear the radio broadcast of the reports on the struggle, songs sung by the women and other voices that made this event After I came across the record I decided to follow its history by trying to find out what has happened to the women and how they would look at the event today. I tracked down three of the women who took part in the struggle. The result was an installation in the Gelsenkirchen Kunstverein, which is made of two parts: The first part is a video of an interview I made with the "heinze frauen" (The "Heinze women" as the press use to call them) where they tell about their experiences during these years. Part of the video shows the women listening to the record and reacting to the memories that the sound activates. The second part of the installation is a record player with the record and a film (the film has no sound) that was made by one of the colleagues during the last demonstration in Kassel in 1981. The visitor can listen to the record while watching the film so the record becomes a loose soundtrack for the amateur film of the same subject. |
"Keiner schiebt uns weg", 2005 video\audio installation 14min 03sec |
The record archive, in process Gal’s record archive is an ongoing project of collecting vinyl records that sound document historical events of the twentieth century. The archive contains speeches and interviews by world leaders, wars in sound, peace agreements, human rights struggles and other radio broadcasts of the events that shaped history from the invention of the phonograph to the fall of the Berlin wall. The phenomena of records that document political and historical events was popular from the 50’s until the late 80’s Most of the records had direct connection to propaganda and for the shaping of a national historical naratives. The collection underlines how a society turns its historical events into commodities and how sound documentation functions in relation to collective memory. |
"Voiceoverhead", 2006 performance, setting variable The German artist Achim Lengerer (Germay Netherlands) and the Israeli artist Dani Gal (Berlin) work with Gal’s record archive (about 300 records) as sound material in order to create new sound compositions. They choose prerecorded sounds from the records and use only the most basic mixing technics to perform it live using Turntables. |
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