Orientation

In the center of "Orientation" is an environmental sculpture of white concrete made by the Israeli sculptor Dani Karavan in 1989. The sculpture, which is situated on the highest point of Tel Aviv, is 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. In the installation is a one-shot video sequence, scanning and deploying the three-dimensional structure into a two-dimensional scratched surface.

Full Credits:

HD video, color, stereo sound, 2014, 5min; sound loop, 30sec; an image of two domes of the shrine of Salama, Kfar Shalem, Israel, taken from All That Remains, The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, p.255, edited by Walid Khalidi, Institute of Palestinian Studies, Washington, D.C.1992; an image of a triangle on remains of a Palestinian house in Kfar Shalem, Israel, taken by Uri Zackhem in 2007, for PalestineRemembered.com; an image of the White Square sculpture taken by Yosef Lior in 1990 for the Tel Aviv Jaffa foundation; print on paper, excerpts from an interview with Dani Karavan.

Made with the support of Argos, Brussels.