Tamar Hirschfeld's work flutters between continents and cultures in a funny, fanciful journey in which a white woman named Bianca ("white") sets out to explore coveted, exotic realms in Africa. In continuation of the figure she assumed in her previous video installation, Schwartze Unveiled (2013)—a powerful cultural satire about the history of mankind—Hirschfeld in the role of Bianca now alludes to the great colonialist expeditions, and subsequently—to the figure of the white woman who ostensibly assimilates into the "primitive" black population, while being charmed by its incomprehensible magic.
Hirschfeld spent time with hunter-gatherer tribes in Africa, and her work refers, to some extent, to that of German filmmaker and photographer, Leni Riefenstahl, whose post-Nazi work depicted and studied the Sudanese Nuba tribe, in the spirit of the romantic journeys by artists-travelers prevalent mainly in the 19th century (such as Paul Gauguin's voyage to Tahiti), which surrendered an "Orientalist" fascination with the artistic qualities of the wild landscapes and the "savages" living in them.
Hirschfeld creates near-impossible crosses in her work between different video excerpts documenting gatherings of people dancing in the fountain on Rabin Square in Tel Aviv—a leisurely, playful activity which calls to mind tribal rituals. The colorful banquet hall lighting illuminating a stalactite cave in one of the movies crashes into the primitive space of an exotic paradise when the tribal children are innocently tempted by Bianca's grotesque attempts to communicate with them. With her fair hair and complexion, Bianca offers the "natives" myriad costumes; she makes them pose and smile for the camera, and even surrenders to the lens herself, but the result of this pendulous movement between cultures and spaces is fragmentary and does not yield a cohesive, unified narrative. (Drorit Gur Arie, Petach Tikva Museum of Art)
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