"Tseva Adom: between Justice and Display"| ExLab series
Happy and excited to announce the unveiling of artist Moran Asraf's new video art work. It was filmed as part of a series of works outside the laboratory called EXLAB. Moran is part of The Lab's group of artists and has been working there since the beginning of the year. Her work "Tzeva Adom (Red Color): Between Justice and DIsplay" is part of a series of works that have been presented in the past, but this is the first time she has been photographed in a public space, in the Cultural Square between Hashalom Court of Justice and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Moran Asraf, a multidisciplinary artist, has exhibited many works in galleries and museums in Israel. Asraf researches social-gender themes that play an important role in raising awareness among Israeli society. Her works deal with the cause for Women social status strengthening and fighting domestic violence against women in particular.
In doing so, Moran joins a number of artists in Israel who deal with similar themes whose visual expression is powerful, ones that leave a visual mark. We can mention Vered Nissim, Anisa Askar, Sigalit Landau, Yocheved Weinfeld in earlier and more radical works, and many more. Unlike the radical art genre that has its roots in the seventies, eighties, mainly from Europe, which includes artists like Vito Aconci, Orlan or contemporary activists and radical artists like the famous Petr Pavlensky, famous for having tightened his testicles to the Kremlin floor or his lips for 730 hours.
In this new job, Moran is seen dressed in her mother's robe, scraping beets on a grater placed between her legs. A kind of giving birth, an abortion, desirable and painful, bleeding shouts. Moran cries for of all those women who are murdered and violated every day. Every woman has a grated beetroot patty placed on the seating platform in the culture square. Is this an exhibit? Or is there another criminal case that will not be handled properly?
Her new work was filmed during the second closure, very few people walked around the square, the museum was locked, a kind of Holocaust Day atmosphere prevailed in the city. The same atmosphere contributed to her body's sense of imprisonment. Every cry here and there, sweat, the physical difficulty of the action, increased the same hybridization of the artist, which remained as evidence of social / cultural, almost political crime. In a sense it is the Kristallnacht for the souls all those women who were murdered and will be murdered in Israel and worldwide.
Her work may even bring us back to a scandalous but no less important video work, presented at the Seventh Biennale in Berlin, by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski, "The Game of Tag" (1999). His work, which has been censored from all over the Internet, deals with a metaphorical reconstruction of the act of murder, occurring at the scene of the murder, as an act of prey, a kind of therapy of pain by the pain. The signs of the pain and suffering of the Holocaust victims are still visible on the Gaz chamber walls. The apparent comparison sounds dissonant, but the closure, the pain, the shame, the psychoanalytic manipulation are parallel.
This work was filmed by Studio Keenst (Ran Sofer and Tsafrir Elbaz), which specializes in television productions, not from the field of art. For video artists, a reflective layer about the medium of video, envelops all photography of the work and raises questions about the importance and status of the artistic medium in the contemporary world.