As seen in the Bat Yam Architecture and Planning Biennial, “MOBY hosting.” Dramatic backdrops, precise though chaotic movements, and a mythos of ’one for all,’ and ’all for one’ could describe Public Movement’s Promotional Video, which sees the group in urban, recreational, and highly religious environments.
Public Movement explores the political and aesthetic possibilities residing in a group of people acting together. The movement operates in public spaces, studies and creates public choreographies, forms of social order, overt and covert rituals. Among Public Movement’s actions in the past and in the future: manifestations of presence, fictional acts of hatred, new folk dances, synchronized procedures of movement, spectacles, marches, inventing and reenacting moments in the life of individuals, communities, social institutions, peoples, states, and of humanity. It is a representative group, a selected team of artists, with the prospect of becoming a mass movement. Public Movement was founded in November 2006 by Dana Yahalomi and Omer Krieger.
Also on the screening program, ”Tribal Fire” curated by Eyal Danon. Works in this selection offer a trek along an imaginary time-line that stretches between re-enacting and pre-enacting, between re-visiting and speculating. The artists allow us to visit past events through their re-enactments or speculate on future events by pre-enacting them. Presented at Estampa Art Fair, Madrid, 2008.
Danon writes, ”The work “Promotional Video” by Public Movement can be seen as an example for such a process. The work was created in the guise of a promotional film and it features a collection of choreographies performed by the group members. Public Movement usually perform in the public sphere and recreate military and civic ceremonies and rituals. These are well known by the Israeli public from events such as memorial days, Independence Day, official ceremonies and well known TV broadcasts fixed in the public memory through their exposure in the media.
The group members wear uniforms for most of their performances. These give them an institutional look, unidentified but recognizable. It makes them part of a general body of power be it the military, police or youth movement. This allows them to blur the boundaries between the “legitimized” violence of the state to uncontrolled acts of violence. The re-enactments of Public Movement deal with the visibility and aesthetics of the events and their violent nature. They juxtapose the choreography and decoration with the content of the re-enacted event thus emphasizing its violent fascist dimension. The group uses ambivalence as a tactic for camouflage. It is at the same time a part of the establishment and an outsider. Their appearance gives credit to their re-enactment and makes it more real.”
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