Dor Guez Videos Exhibition in New York at The Jewish Museum

Dor Guez
The Monayer Family: Three Videos
July 13 - Subaru-Mercedes - (Sa)Mira
The Jewish Museum, NYC
Through September 7, 2010

The Jewish Museum presents The Monayer Family: Three Videos by Dor Guez since March 14 through September 7, 2010 in the Museum’s Barbara and E. Robert Goodkind Media Center. In this series of portraits, Dor Guez offers perspectives on ethnic identity, citizenship, and prejudice from different generations of the Monayers, a Christian Arab family in Israel. Originally from the multiethnic, multifaith city of Lod - called al-Lydd by the Palestinians - family members in the videos include: Jacob, the patriarch who recounts the expulsion of the Arab citizens of the city of Lod after the 1948 war; his son Sami, who describes growing up among Jews as an Israeli citizen while simultaneously claiming a Palestinian identity; and Jacob’s granddaughter Samira, who recounts her experience of prejudice as she is mistaken for being Jewish. Counted among 125,000 Christian Arabs in Israel, the Monayers consider themselves a minority within a minority with respect to the Muslim population. To further complicate matters, Guez is from a mixed Jewish and Christian Arab family..

When asked to define his identity, Dor Guez responded in an online interview, “I have been dealing with this for years, and the truth is that I’m not sure I’m looking for an answer. It depends on the place, time, and context. What does it mean to label oneself? My ID says I’m Jewish. Is this my main reference? . . . I have the right to choose and the right to decide, as well as the right to re-examine what those definitions say about me.”

The title of the first video, July 13 (2008-09, 13 min., 18 sec.), refers to the date in 1948 which the Israeli army entered the city of Lod. Jacob Monayer describes the city’s occupation, the plundering of possessions and homes, and the establishment of the Lod ghetto for those who remained. The video includes footage of Jacob posing at St. George’s Church, where many Christian Arabs hid during the war in 1948, and of the artist dutifully decorating his grandparents’ Christmas tree. 

The title of Subaru-Mercedes (2008-09, 8 min., 10 sec.) serves as a metaphor for Arab Christian identity, a hybrid of Arab/Eastern (Subaru) and Israeli/Western (Mercedes) cultures. While Sami Monayer attempts to articulate his multiple nationalities, his wife and children interject their opinions and interrupt his narrative from off screen. Like Sami’s sense of self, the scene is chaotic and contradictory.

In (Sa)Mira (2008-09, 13 min. 40 sec.), Dor Guez’s cousin recalls an incident at a Jerusalem restaurant where she works part-time while pursuing a degree in psychology at Hebrew University. Samira, who possesses a European appearance and flawlessly accented Hebrew, received complaints from Jewish customers who were offended that she did not reveal that she is an Arab. Her manager asked her to refrain from signing her checks with her given name. Filmed in multiple takes, the repetition of Samira’s narrative ultimately leads her to confront racism in Israeli society.

DOR GUEZ is an interdisciplinary artist and curator, and a researcher of photography at Tel Aviv University. His artistic practice is centered on questions of multiculturalism and ethnic identity. Guez’ work explores an intricate, multifaceted reality, challenging the boundaries and binary oppositions between East and West, Jews and Arabs, religion and secularism, Israeliness and Palestinianism. He has staged several one-person exhibitions, participated in numerous group shows, and curated, among others, the exhibitions Forbidden Junctions and Back to the Canon: Claude Cahun's Portrait Photographs at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. Recently, his work was exhibited at the XIV Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean held in Macedonia. Georgiopolis at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art was his first museum solo show.

Located on the third floor of The Jewish Museum, the Goodkind Media Center houses a digital library of radio and television programs from the Museum’s National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting (NJAB). It also features a changing exhibition space dedicated to video and new media. Using computer workstations, visitors are able to search material by keyword and by categories such as art, comedy, drama, news, music, kids, Israel, and the Holocaust.

The Jewish Museum
1109 5th Ave at 92nd St
Manhattan, New York NY 10128

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Joshua Mosley, dread – Exhibition at ICA, Philadelphia

Joshua Mosley, dread

Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

January 16 - March 29, 2009

JOSHUA MOSLEY, dread, 2007

Mixed media animation and five bronze sculptures, 6 minutes. 

Courtesy of the artist and Donald Young Gallery, Chicago

Joshua Mosley titled his most recent installation dread after photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s motion study sequences of a dog named Dread. Made over a two-year period, Mosley’s dread is composed of five bronze sculptures, and a six-minute, black-and-white, animated video that combines computer and stop-motion animation, as well as the artist’s own music and dialogue. dread is on view in ICA’s second floor gallery.

dread is installed in two adjacent rooms. The first houses five, small bronze figures on pedestals spaced about the room. Enter the second room to see the film, projected large so as to evoke the scale of the environment the characters inhabit: a real world place created using sequenced still photographs. But unlike the real world, music notes replace ambient sounds. Composed by the artist, each character has its own “soundtrack.” dread follows philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Blaise Pascal on something of a nature walk. They encounter flora and fauna, and engage in conversation about existence, God, and nature; in the end, they encounter Dread.

This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Jenelle Porter, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The exhibition catalogue has been supported by the generous sponsorship of Barbara B. & Theodore R. Aronson. Additional funds for the catalogue have been provided by The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts. ICA is also grateful for exhibition support from the Harpo Foundation and Goldberg Foundation. Additional funds for the exhibition have been provided by David & Gerrie Pincus; The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; The Dietrich Foundation; Inc.; the Overseers Board for the Institute of Contemporary Art; friends and members of ICA; and the University of Pennsylvania. On behalf of the artist, the ICA would also like to thank the following for support of the project: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage through the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and the Dean’s Office and the Overseers Special Projects Fund of the School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

Click here for a short biography of Joshua Mosley and about Joshua Mosley: American International, exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, March 12 - August 29, 2010

Trance: Hypnotic Video Art

Philadelphia Museum of Art presents Trance, An Exhibition Of Hypnotic Contemporary Video

Although rapid, MTV-style editing may be the mode most commonly associated with contemporary video, a significant number of notable video artists are exploring more deliberate and slowly paced approaches to the medium. Trance: New Work in Video, an exhibition on view from October 6, 1998 through January 10, 1999, will feature seven works made by artists during the 1990s.

The videos in Trance have been edited using techniques such as slow motion and repetition to produce powerful and hypnotic effects. Projected directly onto a large screen, each video will be shown for a period of two weeks. Trance will be on view in the Video Gallery 179 on the first floor.

Featured artists include Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist whose video Pamela (1997) is a mesmerizing take on a day in the life of a flight attendant; Canadian Rodney Graham, whom we watch sleep in the back of a van as it drives through the city streets of Vancouver in Halcion Sleep (1994); New Yorker Seoungho Cho, a native of South Korea whose work, Identical Time (1997), presents images of a blighted subway journey to reflect upon urban isolation and dislocation; Philadelphia's Peter Rose, who explores subterranean rituals that celebrate the solstices and equinoxes of the sun in Understory (1997); Helen Mirra, a resident of Chicago, excerpts Jean Vigo's 1934 film L'Atalante in Third (1998), a spellbinding video in which time seems suspended; British artist Abigail Lane whose work Never Never Mind lyrically blends sound and image to capture a few pigeons in a seemingly "neurotic" moment; and American Bill Viola, who created The Passing (1991) as a personal response to birth and death in the family.

Trance has been organized by Kathleen Forde of the Department of 20th-Century Art.