Opening: 22-07-2016 10:00
Date: July 22, 2016
Venue: Delphi
Hour: 10:00
Free admission
GROUND EFFECT
by Nadav Assor (US/IL)
Video installation - screening with Skype talk
Ground Effect is an investigation of the constantly shifting, 80 km long line in Israel under which rainfall amounts to less than 200mm a year on average. This line, which aligns with the global desert belt, cuts from the east, near the West Bank, to the west, near the Gaza strip. It is where I grew up, an area divided between industrial scale agriculture, nature preserves, ancient and recent ruins, Bedouin towns, encampments and olive groves, artificial pine forests planted on contested lands, rural Jewish communities, and military practice zones. This area has been fittingly called “The Conflict Shoreline” by architect Eyal Weizman in his recent book of the same name.
This is the act I set out to perform in making this piece, walking a continuous line through the zones and landscapes defining this area. The process involves scanning and compressing the ground surface (from wild and cultured plants, to dust, to Jewish and Bedouin graves, to walled-off water reservoirs, military monuments and border fences) via waist-high aerial video, while being surveilled in turn by an unmanned drone running algorithms similar to what a military drone would use to isolate motion from a noisy background.
NADAV ASSOR
Nadav Assor (US / Israel) creates videos, installations, performances, and objects. His work deals with the performed mediation of cities, bodies and personal narratives via appropriated military-industrial technologies. Assor has exhibited internationally in festivals, music venues, museums and galleries in North America, Israel, Europe and Asia. He has recently exhibited and performed work at three of the recent Transmediale Festivals at the KW Center in Berlin, the 2013 Berlin Director’s Lounge, the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco, Spectrum NYC, and Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. He was born in the US and grew up in Israel, where he earned his Bachelors from the Midrashsa College of Art. He holds an MFA as a Full Merit Fellow in Art & Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC, 2010). He is the inaugural recipient of the SAIC Edes Award, one of the school’s highest honors, and also among the 2011 awardees of the Israeli Ministry of Culture’s Young Artist awards. Since 2012, Nadav has been an Assistant Professor of Expanded Media and a Fellow at the Ammerman Center for Art & Technology in Connecticut College.
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