The third show in our May program – a weekly program featuring a performance or installation by a visual artist that centers on the use of recent historical music or sound – is a video installation by Dani Gal (IL, 1975) called
SEASONAL UNREST
In Seasonal Unrest (2009), we see a large-screen portrait of a foley artist who is producing the new sound track for a film in a recording studio. The film for which this new soundtrack is produced is the 1970 documentary, “Grenade in Gaza’.
The show will open on Saturday, May 22nd, from 8 – 10 pm, and will run through until May 26.
For further information and visuals, please contact the gallery: office@wilfriedlentz.com or +31 (0)10 4126459.
May Program
Following the exhibition with Dani Gal, the fourth and last show of the May program will be a large two channel video installation by Matt Stokes, these are the days (2009), featuring a punk gig in Austin Texas as well as a punk band from the same city playing a new sound-track to it. This installation opens Saturday the 29th of May also 8 pm.
May 8th there was a performance by Nico Dockx (BE, 1974) and Carl Michael von Hausswolff[ (SE, 1956) who showed their archival material on ghost transmissions and made new work on this subject which will be published later this summer. The film Sound Track Stage about the meeting of the Rotterdam hip hop and hardcore scenes by Wendelien van Oldenborgh runs till May 19th.
In Seasonal Unrest (2009) by Dani Gal, we see a large-screen portrait of a foley artist who is producing the new sound track for a film in a recording studio. Watching the film and imagining how a given scene should sound, a foley artist imitates real sounds (for example, the footsteps of a character) using his body and different objects to produce believable sound effects for the film.
The film for which this new soundtrack is produced is the 1970 documentary, “Grenade in Gaza’, directed by Mordechei Kirshenbaum. In the film, an Israeli TV crew enters Gaza for the first time to portray everyday life in the territory, which had become occupied three years previously. The film also addresses the misuse of the medium of film to create anti-Israeli propaganda by the Egyptians, itself claiming to provide an objective image of the reality of life in Gaza.
This documentary is shown without sound, in black and white, on a monitor next to the screen.
In the meantime, on the large screen we experience the foley artist at work, who seems mainly concerned with making the historical film material “even more real” with the help of his artificially generated sound effects and a new translation in English.
The juxtaposition of the two films exposes the mechanisms of political documentation. Seasonal Unrest enlightens us as to how media can be instrumental for political aims, pointing in a subversive manner to the role the media plays in the conflict between Israel and Palestine — then as it does now.
As a counterpoint to the video installation, Gal will also present a small watercolour painting in the Janre Painting tradition of Yigal Amir (the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin who painted while sitting in court watching a video of his own crime).
Recent solo and group shows have been at the Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln, GAM Turin (IT), Migros Museum Zurich, the Pecci Museum in Prato (s) (IT), Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg (s) (DE), Freymond-Guth & Co. Fine Arts, Zürich (s) and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
Credits film:
Archive video-Grenade in Gaza, 1970, director Mordechei Kirshenbaum, courtesy: the Israeli broadcast authority
Camera: Emre Erkmen and Dani Gal
Edit: Dani Gal
Foley: foley-studio-berlin
Sound:Thomas Wallmann
Stills: Yoav Horesh
Voice: Jac Rubinstein,
Jeff Burrell
Jeremy Shaw
Steven Jacob
Thanks to the Centro per l’arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci and Freymond-Guth & Co
