Video and performance video works 2001-2017 (in reverse chronological order)
[note: camera and editing by the artist, unless otherwise noted]
The list includes video art, documentation of live performance, performance for video only and drawing videos.
Works with * – see performance section for more details and images.
Some works can be rented or acquired directly from the artist, or through Vtape – artists’ video distribution organization, Toronto, Canada.
Works marked with + are currently available in the Vtape online catalogue:
www.vtape.org/catalogue.htm
Flux, 2017
Athens, Greece
Duration: 2 excerpts: 46, 57 minutes
A one hour live drawing performance. A state of constant movement, where nothing is fixed, everything dissolves and transforms. To the sound of constant crashing of waves against the shore, the artist marks and erases perpetually, referencing Da Vinci’s late deluge drawings.
The work was performed at the Romantso Centre in Athens, for Metamorphosis interdisciplinary arts festival, March 2017.
click here to view video >>
Scarred and Punctured, 2017
Caylus, France
Duration: 2:15
In an ancient and abandoned church, I create a sited drawing- a long scroll of heavy paper laid over the stone floor, which I puncture and pierce with stone tools. The work is carried out at the Church of Saint Amans-le-vieux, on the outskirts of Caylus, in southwest France, as part of the artist in residence program at DRAWinternational, Caylus, September 2017
click here to view video >>
Blurring of Lines on a Brick Wall, 2016
London, England
Duration: 1.27 minutes
2 performers move along a brick wall, alternating between drawing a line, and then blurring it, using brush, rag, hand. A third performer joins them and together they rub the wall to remove as much charcoal as possible, leaving a grey, cloudy haze, a hovering presence. Asserting and negating, positing and dissolving, drawing and erasing – all dualities are embraced.
The collaborative drawing, with Nuria Guix and Malega Palser, was performed at the Crows Nest Gallery, in London, England, for the Draw to Perform Symposium, summer 2016.
click here to view video >>
Marking the Passing of a Day, 2016
Toronto, Canada
Duration:1.05
For a live 24 hour durational drawing performance. With each tick of the seconds hand of the clock, I mark the surface of the white wall with a charcoal line. An uncharted process drawing unfolds, a testimony to the time spent creating it.The repetitive marking action makes concrete the passing of time and the abstract notion of a day.
During the performance, a video of the work is streamed live to other locations around the world, and performances from elsewhere are streamed live into the gallery.
The performance took place as part of the Duration and Dialogue Performance Festival, Katzman Gallery, Toronto, Canada.
click here to view video >>
Geography (a rough draft), 2015
Ramat Hasharon, Israel
duration: 2.15
A fictive world geography- where landmasses are forming, continents are being crisscrossed, or cut up into nationstates, then being dissolved, and in the end, returning to a state of undifferentiated emptiness, ‘tohu vavohu’.
click here to view video >>
Walking the Walls of the Leper’s Colony, 2014 *
Jerusalem, Israel
Duration: 1:10 min.
The Hansen Hospital for Lepers, built in the 19th century, is surrounded by a high stone wall. As part of my exploration of the site, I attempted, without success, to walk around the whole enclosure.
The work was part of Mamuta’s performance event, Borderline, for the 5th Biennial of Drawing, Jerusalem
click here to view video >>
Mapping the Territory, 2014 *
Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel
excerpt, duration: 4:00 min.
A live performance, collaboration of spoken word and drawing, with Yonatan Kunda
With lines and voice, with Hebrew and charcoal, with words and erasure, between mother and son, the two map out an improvisational encounter.
The work was performed for the poetry/performance series, Orpheus in Jaffa, the Arab-Hebrew Theatre, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel
click here to view video >>
Pilgrimage, 2013 *
Ramat Hasharon, Israel
Duration: 2:15 min.
In a live performance, the artist walks through a residential neighborhood of her town, Ramat Hasharon, to the former grounds of the ‘Midrasha’, once the site of an important art school, now abandoned and neglected.
The artist is itinerant, like the pilgrim, She draws as she walks, and invites others to join her.
For a studio event, Ramat Hasharon, Israel
click here to view video >>
Spoken Encyclopedia, 2013 *
Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel
Duration: 1:38 min.
For the live performance, two performers stand with their backs to the large wall installation, Particles of Knowledge, and read out random passages from the ‘Encyclopedia Hebraica’ to each other, and to the audience. Members of the audience join in and recite their own passages, creating a cacophonous chorus of voices.
5 Approaches to the Encyclopedia Hebraica, Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel
click here to view video >>
Marking, drawing, walking, erasing, 2013
Duration: 1:02 min.
A video/audio collage – that compresses over 10 years of my interdisciplinary practice into a one minute video.
[spoken word excerpt is from ‘Emergency Dream’, part of Yonatan Kunda’s live collab performance at Speaking and Marking, home studio event, 2012]
Created for RAIQ one minute video competition, The Quebec Interdisciplinary Arts Network.
click here to view video >>
Morph, 2009-2011
Duration: 2:42 min.
A large series of changing drawings, in charcoal and erasure on a plaster wall; the drawings slowly shift around series of images- web, house, ducks, pods, flag , chaos,
all organized around the black holes left by screws in the wall.
click here to view video >>
Marking Space, 2011
Duration: 3:39
Documentation of a collaborative sound and drawing project in the Kentler Drawing Space, in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. The work consisted of two weeks of exploration in and around the gallery, a live performance and an installation.
click here to view video >>
Garden Work, 2010
Duration: 3:23 min.
In a series of short works in my own garden, I continue to investigate the meaning of ‘feeling at home’ and cultivating one’s own garden.
click here to view video >>
Drawing Web, 2010
Duration: 1:05 min. (loop)
Drawing and erasing with charcoal, onto my studio wall.
click here to view video >>
Dissolve, 2010
Duration: 2:38 min.
A continuation of a series of performances and altered books, in which I intervene into texts of classic western philosophy.
click here to view video >>
Prima Materia, 2009
Duration: 2 minutes (loop)
Using manipulated stills from the performance series, Daily Interactions (1999-2004), I fill my mouth and my eye sockets with earth, accompanied by sounds mineral, vegetable and animal.
click here to view video >>
The Consolation of Philosophy, 2008 *
Rishon Le’tzion, Israel
Duration: 2:08 min.
Documentation of live performance
Final version: with added audio track-2010
I wonder about the relationship of the classic philosophic Western texts from my university studies to the lived world; and between the disembodied truths learned through these books to truth gleaned from day to day life in the physical, sensual, material world.
Spices, foodstuff, earth, are applied to the pages of these books; sometimes I lick the pages, attempting to further close the gap, merging both paradigms of knowledge.
The work was performed at the opening of a group show, Reading Material, 4 artists’ interactions with books.
The show was held at the Kenar Municipal Art Gallery, in Rishon Letzion, Israel
click here to view video >>
Marking Stones, 2009 *
Nodar, Portugal
Duration: 7:20 min.
Documentation of an extended performance action
Final Version: 2009
In the tiny village of Nodar, slate rock is everywhere – from huge slabs to glass-like shards; it is used and reused to build and pave, and mark boundaries; and it is crumbling back to its natural state. I wander through the village, stopping at different points to draw, mark, incise the stone, according to its particular form or state at each site. (The works include titles like – Rock of Flickering Sunlight, Slabs of Graffiti, Falling Water, Encircled Moss, Sun Rays…)
The work was carried out at a 3 week residency at Nodar Artists Center, Nodar, Portugal, run by Binaural Media group.
click here to view video >>
360 Degrees, 2008 *
Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: 2:56 min.
Documentation of a live performance action
A line drawing created by walking around the perimeter of the retaining wall of the roof of a large industrial building in South Tel Aviv at sunset uses a thick piece of charcoal. (The action was projected live on a monitor inside the building for the event.)
Performed for Night Trains [SalonD’Automne III], Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel 2008
click here to view video >>
Erased Monument, 2008 *
Ramat Gan, Israel
Duration: 3:46 min.
Documentation of live performance
Documentation of an 8 hour drawing performance. at the studio of the Israeli sculptor, Natan Rapoport, once renown for his monumental nationalist and holocaust memorial works. With big sticks of charcoal from local bonfires, I create a mural, on the outside studio wall, using elements from the artist’s repertoire. After completing the virtuoso- style drawing, I start to destroy it, using erasers, sandpaper, smearing it with berries from the yard, leaving only a pale layer of the expressive drawing. The process mirrors both the career of the sculptor- whose grandiose portrayals of a collective ideal have long ago fallen out of favor, as well as the temporality of the collective historical memory.
For The Menorah Returns: An evening of works in tribute to the artist Natan Rapoport, Rapoport Studio, Ramat Gan, Israel.
click here to view video >>
Topographical Readings, 2007
Jerusalem, Israel
Duration: 2:48 min.
Documentation of a live performance
In the library of the artist Ana Ticho’s home (once the surgery room of her eye surgeon husband), I sit at a table and draws over the pages of historical books on Jerusalem, connecting the drawings of the surrounding done by Ticho back to the more primary landscape underlying the layers of history and myth that cover the land and prevent any clear sight. Intermittently I stamp the pages with a rubber stamp in the form of an eye attached to my forehead.
Performed for VIP-an evening of site-based performances at Ana Ticho House, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
click here to view video >>
Housekeeping, 2007 [Two versions]
2007 duration 9:47 min. / 2009 duration 5:40
In a series of short video ‘poems’, I interact with the objects and spaces of my house and garden, exploring the complexity of meanings and attitudes, symbolic and material responses, problematics and possibilities all invested in my relationship to the concept and specificity of house and home.
The short works: Coming Through the Cracks, Outside In, Digging In, A Happy Homemaker Counts Her Blessings,/ The Third Eye, A Dog’s Life, A Backyard Pilgrimage,
Transplant, Practicing Humility, Reminder, The End of the World.
The work can be viewed as a single or multi-channel video.
click here to view video >>
The End of the World +
Duration: 1:12 min.
A still life of everyday objects to which the artist is attached- books, music cds, flowers from the garden, a cup of coffee – slowly disappears under a blanket of white powder that falls like snow.
Like the old Dutch still life painting genre Memento Mori– reminding us of the transience of our life and attachments in the face of inevitable death – here too that awareness of ephemerality exists. But here it is compounded by the suggestions of destruction and of ecological disaster caused by human intervention. (Also included as the last piece in Housekeeping.)
click here to view video >>
A Walk with Mask, Streamers, and Sardine Cans, 2007 *
Lisbon, Portugal
Duration: 4:00 min.
Documentation of a live performance
During the festival honoring the local saint, I decorate myself with objects and materials from the area and walks slowly through the streets of the old quarter.
Performed at the Grande Churrasco-Performance Meeting, Lisbon, 2007.
click here to view video >>
Walking Abandoned Walls, 2006 *+
East Haddam, Connecticut, U.S.A.
Duration: 1:30 min.
To the tune of traditional old American folk songs, I walk on the many stone walls constructed several hundred years ago in the fields of an old abandoned New England farmstead. For all their labor-intensive construction, these walls now stand deserted amid the fields that are slowly returning to woodland. The work was carried out at the I-Park Artists’ Residency, East Haddam, Connecticut, USA, 2005.
click here to view video >>
Donkey Walk, 2006 *+
Kibbutz Naan, Israel
Duration: 2:10 min.
Camera: Yonatan Kunda
Documentation of a live performance
The artist leads a donkey, dragging a chain of eucalyptus bark with plastic irrigation parts from a local factory, along a path bordering the huge wall of cactus plants that divides the kibbutz from the open fields. The walk is a journey through on a fast disappearing landscape, infused with collective nostalgia.
The work was carried out at the Live Art Festival, Kibbutz Naan, Israel April 2006.
click here to view video >>
Reforestation (and a Topography of Longing), 2006 + [see Installation section]
Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: 3:15 min.
Camera: Naomi Maiberg, Dani Eshet
In the stairwell of the old building on Herzl Street in Tel Aviv, the cracks in the peeling walls remind me vividly of the maps of the waterways and canoe routes of the northern Ontario forests and fill me with a longing for those endless, wild, and uninhabited landscapes of my childhood. I began to color in the forms of the lakes and rivers, and on the landing, under the projection of an image of northern Ontario lake country and recording of the loons, I plant a forest. This forest, like the many other forests planted here, is not at all like those childhood forests; evergreens, but not indigenous, not endless and uncharted but planned, orderly, planted purposefully and intentionally. I am attempting to bridge the two forested landscapes, the two worlds that I call ‘home.’
Performance and installation for Home Sick, Salon D’Automne 2, Herzl 29, Tel Aviv, Israel.
click here to view video >>
Down to Earth, 2006 *+
Barcelona, Spain
Duration: 2:30 min.
Camera (stills): Josep Asuncion
Documentation of a live performance
In the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, Idig up earth, shovel it into sacks, and carry it through the streets, accompanied by medieval ecclesiastic music in one of the sacks. I descend into the ancient basement cellar of a local gallery, where I carry out actions using the earth, the local produce and the debris collected in the area: these are projected onto a large monitor facing the street.
“‘Earth’ is a culturally loaded and convoluted term, the underlying material of the locale, over which our complex, man-made environment is built. But this intimate, sensual connection, unacknowledged or negated, must be carried on surreptitiously underground, like the meeting of the medieval ‘witches’ mixing their medicinal herbs on the outskirts of town.”(from EBent catalogue)
Performed for the Ebent’03 International Performance Festival, Barcelona, Spain.
click here to view video >>
Fields of Home, 2005 +
Duration: 2:02 min.
In the fields bordering my neighborhood in a town near Tel Aviv, four enormous antennae-(communication receptors in the form of huge balls) situated in an army base look down, like huge eyes, over the whole area, a mixed landscape of houses, agricultural fields, and army installations.
click here to view video >>
Backyard with Olive Grove, 2005 *+
Savyon, Israel
Duration: 4:04 minutes
Documentation of a site-specific, performance-based project in the remnants of an old olive grove, now the backyard of a suburban home outside Tel Aviv over the course of many months. Activities included treating the trees – knitting a sleeve on the trunk, coating the bark with soup powder, binding the trees to a pillar of the house, painting the leaves- as well as more direct body involvement, lying or swinging in the trees.
The political, the cultural and the historical issues, musings on land, entitlement, justice, along with personal and ecological concerns, all exist as a context/backdrop to the multiple activities.
click here to view video >>
Night Swing, 2005 *+
Savyon, Israel
Length : 1.37 min.
I tie a lawn chair to one of the olive trees in the yard, and attempt repeatedly, and only with partial success, to get into it for a leisurely swing.
(The work came out of Backyard with Olive Grove project.)
click here to view video >>
Intimate Investigations, 2004 *
Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 8.22 min.
Camera: Wendy Rubin
Editing assistance: Western Front staff
Dressed in a rain suit, I wander around Vancouver for 5 days, playing and exploring the intertwining of the magnificent and the mundane, from primal forest to parking lots.
The video documentation is presented, along with a live performance and an installation, at The Western Front’s Luxe space, November 2003.
The work is part of the Western Front’s Contemporary Ritual performance series and also took part in Vancouver’s LIVE Performance Festival.
(See anthology Ritual in Contemporary Performance, Victoria Singh, The Western Front, Vancouver, Canada 2004.)
click here to view video >>
10 Mandalas, 2005 *+
La Minerve, Quebec, Canada
Duration: 8.07 min.
Using the materials within arms’ reach at each location of the Laurentian mountain site, I create a series of mandala forms. The locations included garden, forest, river, sand dune, hut interior, meadow, swamp. The parallel activity of the Tibetan Buddhist artist Losang Samten who created a traditional sand mandala during the residency influenced and contrasted the concept and forms of my works. (Sketches and notes made for each work are included in the video piece.)
The work was created for a residency, Circle with a Centre, at the Boreal Art/Nature Center, La Minerve, Quebec, Canada.
click here to view video >>
River Mandala, 2005 *+
La Minerve, Quebec, Canada
Duration: 2:45 min.
A floating mandala form is created on a river.
A detailed look at the creation of one of the mandala forms from the 10 Mandala project.)
click here to view video >>
Daily Interactions, 2004 +
Duration: 10:40 min.
Using common natural materials – vines, thorns, grasses, petals – from the immediate environment of my neighborhood in the town near Tel Aviv where I live, and my own body, I carry out simple actions- I wash my face in a bowl of bougainvillea petals, weave fichus vines between my toes, prick my finger with the thorn of the cactus leaves- fusing the erotic and domestic, the prosaic and the sacred, playing with the physical and metaphoric possibilities of each material, to feel ‘at home’ on a visceral level with my surroundings, and to circumvents the loaded political imagery that any encounter with nature here inevitably takes on.
click here to view video >>
City Shelter, 2003 *+
Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: 4:20 min.
5 days and nights in a bomb shelter, situated in a neighborhood park in Tel Aviv, vacated in preparation for the impending Iraqi war (In regular times, the shelter serves as an artists’ exhibition space.) The space becomes both a work retreat, and a place to explore the border zone between ‘normal life’ and ‘emergency life’.
The work was carried out at the vacated Limbus Gallery, Tel Aviv Israel.
click here to view video >>
Walk to the Sea, 2003 *+
Tel Aviv, Israel
Duration: 3:10 min.
Camera: Dana Levy
Documentation of a live performance
I make my way slowly from Rabin Plaza in front of the Tel Aviv City Hall (renamed after his murder there in 1996), towards the sea, dragging a heavy chain of sabras – the local cactus plants – a plant loaded with symbolism for both parties to the conflict here; I enter the water and the chain of cacti float away into the sea.
(The work was performed for the “Day of Simultaneous Actions”, as part of FIX02 Catalyst Arts Performance Festival, Belfast, Northern Ireland.)
click here to view video >>
See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, 2003 *+
Jerusalem, Israel
Duration: 1:20 min.
Documentation of a live performance
The work takes place in one of the cells of a 19th century building situated in the “Russian Compound”- originally a hostel for Russian Christian women pilgrims, used as a prison during the British mandate period, and now a museum of the Jewish Underground Movement of the time.
I sit in a cell, eyes, ears and mouth stopped up with petals. The strains of medieval choral music is heard, interrupted intermittently by harsh electronic sounds.
The work was presented at HEARA 4, a multimedia site event, Jerusalem, Israel.
click here to view video >>
Nightshift, 2002 *+
Kibbutz Nachshon, Israel
Duration: 8:25 min.
An empty apartment at the end of a row of workers’ accommodations in a wooded area is the site of an all-night performance. I collect natural materials from the vicinity of the site and throughout the night carry out improvised actions, arising from the interaction of materials, body and the kibbutz context. These are documented with Polaroid snapshots, which are left around the room, along with the materials, as a record of the night’s events.
The work was presented as part of Blurrr: The 3rd Biennial of Performance Art, Kibbutz Nachshon, Israel.
click here to view video >>
Local Activity, 2001 *+
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Duration: 5.05 min.
I come to Winnipeg, the city where my grandmother arrived from the ‘old country’, and where my mother grew up. I visit the family’s old neighborhood, I walk around the campus and the outlying fields. I then spent a week in the gallery, creating order from the chaos of local material, looking for threads of connection through this labor, to my grandmother’s immigrant experience.
The performance work took place in Gallery One One One, School of Art, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.
click here to view video >>
18 Short Ceremonies for a Building of Emptied Rooms, 2001 *+
Potsdam, Germany
Duration: 6:36 min.
Along with 4 other Israeli and five German artists, I was invited to create a work on the grounds of an old military installation on the outskirts of Berlin, built in the 20’s and run by the German and then East German government. Over the course of a week, I perform a series of private rituals in different rooms of a large arms production building in the process of being dismantled.
“I wander through the building after the workers have left for the day. I am confronted by an eerie silence, an odor of decay; an oppressive sense of the harsh regimes once served hangs in the air.
It is like a descent into hell, yet also holds the beauty of an empty cathedral… With materials from the building and the surrounding woods, I perform actions that try to delicately balance between the private and the collective, between memory and celebration of the present.” (from text accompanying exhibition installation.)
The work was carried out at the Gross Glienicke Military Grounds, Potsdam, part of an Israeli-German artists’ project and symposium, Memory and Vision.
click here to view video >>
