At the center of “The Orientalist" exhibition is a multi-channel video installation composed of four short and different films, projected side by side in full synchronization. The four films are filmed in the same manner and syntax, and are arranged at exactly the same rate, with each crop, photo angle change, or dramatic increase respectively. The films play in perfect timing, but in each viewing cycle, one of them is accompanied by a soundtrack, accompanied by the others - always a popular "oriental" song, composed in the 80's and 90's, before the outbreak of the Eastern Music Revolution. The identical structure of the four films is an attempt to trace the soundtrack accompanying them; The rhythm and the structure of the melody serve as a guide to the editing of the films and the drama they play on the viewer. Eastern music as a musical genre with social and emotional meanings is the inspiration for the artist for parallel content that emerges in the project, and serves as the vanishing point for which the various worlds in the films are channeled. Although the four films are arranged in exactly the same format, as if they were carrying the same genetic load, each of them presents a completely different picture of the world. Together they express areas of conflict and struggle in the reality of the artist's life, and spread four spheres of occurrence and worldviews: a double-interpersonal arena, a parent-family arena, a social arena and a cultural arena. Each film individually investigates the movement of elementary bodies in the human psyche and human culture in an isolated and sterile manner. Together, they accumulate into one simultaneous sequence that presents a comprehensive world picture. Due to the exact repetition of the same cinematic structure in the four films, the obvious hierarchy or order of obvious importance of the various phenomena - are nullified. The viewer becomes an active and dynamic observer who makes decisions during viewing: what connections and implications he maintains between the films, what elements he emphasizes, and mainly, which screen he chooses to watch and what he waives at any given moment. All the films take place in Tel Aviv, the city of residence and the work of Buganim, and are based on fragments of experiences he has experienced in reality. But all of them are planted with seeds of fiction and magic, and supernatural occurrences that could not occur in reality as we know it. Fascinating figures, rising from the sea, alternating or hovering in the air, are subject to the influence of magical and mysterious forces moving between the four elements: earth, air, water, and fire, representing the four arenas of events. The mysterious and emotional power of the films also prevents their obvious symbolism. Religious symbols, Christian and pagan alike, mingle with symbols and psychological representations, along with clear cinematic influences. The Beggar, in which the image of a beggar lying on the sidewalk in a street party setting, represents social conflict, deals with the place of the excluded from the respectable public scene and the dislocations of the existing social order. During the scene, the beggar falls asleep on the pavement, and the cigarette stub in his hand falls on his clothes and ignites until he is on fire. The group of young people preparing for a party at his side ignore the disaster taking place before their eyes, completely oblivious to the plight of the other, waving the flag of escapism and continuing at their party. In the traitorous film, in which the marital conflict is already hinted, a young woman is seen waiting in a dark parking lot. She talks to her partner on the phone and tells him to stop. A young man, who turns out to be her lover, gets into the car and the two kiss and fondle so passionately that his image disappears immediately after what seems to be the climax. The viewer remains confused in front of the woman sitting alone in the car. He assumes that the event is imagined or ended, a representation of sexual fantasy, perhaps a real event. The film takes place mostly in a spacious jeep, a symbol of a stable and padded bourgeoisie, referring to the conflict between the respectable bourgeois framework and the fire of desire that threatens it, between the respectable and polished facade of the secrets and lies that lie beneath it. The film The Crying Child is the most mysterious of all. A young mother sitting on the beach watches her daughter play in the waves. She warns her not to get away from the beach, then lies down on a mat and gives herself to listening to music played on the headphones. The mother is dozing, the waves increase and the sense of danger increases, and the image of the child disappears. When she returns from the waves and approaches the shore, it turns out that she has been replaced by a crying child. The girl changes into a child, her laughter and her response in the waves change into bitter tears. These are seemingly irreconcilable exchanges, but they represent the tension between the world of childhood and the world of parenting and adulthood, and the danger of loss of identity that may lie in the way between the two worlds. The child, as if born from the sea, was crying to his mother as if from a huge womb, or perhaps undergoing a kind of religious baptism, a kind of religious initiation accompanied by tears in which he was accepted into the world of adult culture. Above the film is a sense of danger, hinted at by a sign that reads "Danger" and stands on the beach. The danger is marked by words, the signs of danger are the signs of culture, while the sea and the child emerging from it represent a pre-developmental, wordless, primal, and more creative state before accepting a world of social order mechanisms. The Hovering Girl film also confronts the Western world of knowledge, as represented by the cultural establishment, and the forces of passion that thrive beneath the surface. He documents a lecture by an expert on music and hypnosis, focusing on the ostensibly suggestive effects of oriental music on the listener. As part of her lecture, she performs a live demonstration of a young woman from the audience who, following the activities and explanations of the lecturer, begins to hover in the air. The film draws inspiration from the early psychoanalytic lessons of Charcot, one of Freud's teachers, and is a continuation of Buganim's preoccupation with suggestion and hypnosis in his earlier works, which is analogous to the consumption of art - a seductive invitation to devote himself to an alternative, hypnotic reality. The art in this film is presented as having a magical and magical dimension, one that requires emotional devotion rather than intellectual deciphering. The film takes place in a lecture hall or a performance, and although a miracle occurs, it is a wonder limited to this particular scene, as a performance performed on a stage; A miracle governed by rational interpretation and by the mechanisms of cultural order. Here, too, psychological and psychoanalytic symbols are embedded in Christian symbols (the hovering position is identified as a Christian icon representing the ascension of the soul to heaven or the devout figure of Christ), and it seems that the film represents the tension between the Western world of knowledge and culture and human, emotional and instinctive forces that cannot always be explained rationally. All films represent systems of unequal and unequal power relations. On the face of it, all the films show one side that comes from a position of power (bourgeois, intellectual or authoritarian), while the other side of the equation is at a disadvantage. But that the apparently weakened side is perceived as such only from the institutional and cultural point of view. In fact, the weakened side responds with the means at its disposal: the elements of fire, wind, water and earth, the powers of the mind, not the intellect, the body's sounds, its surging impulses, the desire to fly, burn, It is a side that strives for a passionate and savage place, pre-cultural, pre-religious. Ravit Harari Curator
ארכיוני המרכז הוקמו בתמיכת קרן אוסטרובסקי וארטיס
