Tsibi Geva, Miki Kratsman and Boaz Arad’s video work Lattice, 2002, is the product of a long work process composed of numerous stages. To begin with, this work documents the installation Lattice, which Geva built at Hagar Gallery in Jaffa in 2002 (curator: Tal Ben Zvi). For this work, Geva installed a series of decorative grilles in the gallery’s windows and on the terraces overlooking the decorative grilles ranged from modernists to Orientalist, without clearly distinguishing between them, and were directly related - both formally and methodologically - to the accumulating series of paintings that Geva has created over the years (such as Kaffiyeh and Terrazzo). 

Beyond the formal and material qualities of the grilles, this work allowed for the construction of additional registers of meaning which were related to the act of gazing through them and observing the neighborhood below. The joint video work created by these three artists thus documents the everyday routines of neighborhood residents as seen through the various grilles - beginning in the early morning and ending after sunset. This cinematic gaze is characterized by an insistent clinging to quotidian details, and the work’s internal rhythm is slow and monotonous. The camera is stationary, and only the viewing angle changes from time to time; the only movement is provided by the life unfolding in the street below and by the movement of the passersby. The act of gazing at the neighborhood buildings seen through the grilles sheds a different light on their architectural designs and on the ideal they embody. One building has square modernist windows, while another’s windows are arched. One features colonial-styles columns, while another features typically Israeli plastic shutters and water tanks. Moreover, this work fuses the private and public spheres, the position of viewer and of the one being observed, the modernist grid and softened variations of it, the wandering gaze and the fixed and controlled one. The viewer looking through the grille is in fact the one who is imprisoned, while the person being gazed at retains his freedom of action and movement. This dynamic subverts historical conventions of photography and display that conceived of an autonomous, self-conscious and active subjection of the position of the viewer, and of a passive unconscious object in the position of one being viewed. Lattice thus involves an act of estrangement and conversion that undermines even the simple analogy of the zoo, where a viewer positioned on the exterior observes a circumscribed space containing an imprisoned animal.
(Hadas Maor)

 

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Lattice

Tsibi Geva, Miki Kratsman and Boaz Arad’s video work Lattice, 2002, is the product of a long work process composed of numerous stages. To begin with, this work documents the installation Lattice, which Geva built at Hagar Gallery in Jaffa in 2002 (curator: Tal Ben Zvi). For this work, Geva installed a series of decorative grilles in the gallery’s windows and on the terraces overlooking the decorative grilles ranged from modernists to Orientalist, without clearly distinguishing between them, and were directly related - both formally and methodologically - to the accumulating series of paintings that Geva has created over the years (such as Kaffiyeh and Terrazzo). 

Beyond the formal and material qualities of the grilles, this work allowed for the construction of additional registers of meaning which were related to the act of gazing through them and observing the neighborhood below. The joint video work created by these three artists thus documents the everyday routines of neighborhood residents as seen through the various grilles - beginning in the early morning and ending after sunset. This cinematic gaze is characterized by an insistent clinging to quotidian details, and the work’s internal rhythm is slow and monotonous. The camera is stationary, and only the viewing angle changes from time to time; the only movement is provided by the life unfolding in the street below and by the movement of the passersby. The act of gazing at the neighborhood buildings seen through the grilles sheds a different light on their architectural designs and on the ideal they embody. One building has square modernist windows, while another’s windows are arched. One features colonial-styles columns, while another features typically Israeli plastic shutters and water tanks. Moreover, this work fuses the private and public spheres, the position of viewer and of the one being observed, the modernist grid and softened variations of it, the wandering gaze and the fixed and controlled one. The viewer looking through the grille is in fact the one who is imprisoned, while the person being gazed at retains his freedom of action and movement. This dynamic subverts historical conventions of photography and display that conceived of an autonomous, self-conscious and active subjection of the position of the viewer, and of a passive unconscious object in the position of one being viewed. Lattice thus involves an act of estrangement and conversion that undermines even the simple analogy of the zoo, where a viewer positioned on the exterior observes a circumscribed space containing an imprisoned animal.
(Hadas Maor)