This Place – videoinstallation
by the ritesinstitute (Friedemann Derschmidt and Karin Schneider)
The video installation “This Place” was produced for the exhibition “Overlapping Voices – israeli and palestinian artists” at the Essl Museum in 2008. The exhibition was curated by the Israeli artist Tal Adler, the Austrian artist Friedemann Derschmidt, the Palestinian artist Amal Murkus, and the Austrian Curator and art educator Karin Schneider. It showed the works of 23 artists from Israel/Palestine.
The interviews for “THIS PLACE” were conducted in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Beit Neqofa, Kufur Yasif, and Bethlehem; some took place in the summer of 2007, the majority in February of 2008. The spatial installation serves both to present our personal approach to the issues and to illustrate the complexity we experienced. Listening only to this small group of Israelis and Palestinians (with the sole exception of the Palestinian-Austrian musician Marwan Abado, who lives in Vienna) – most of them are our friends – one can get a sense of how different the approaches to this land are, how different the narratives. Every individual story makes perfect sense; once one hears the voices as an ensemble, things begin to get extraordinarily complicated. It takes about 13 hours to hear all interviews in their entirety.
SEE VIDEOS:
Denis Mashkievich, Amal Nimer Murkus, Yacov G. Stiassny, Jasmin Avissar,
Marwan Abado, Esther Eillam, Mitri Raheb, Shlomit Aharoni Lir,
Salman Masalha, Ilana Shmueli, Kais Bakri, Ruslana Lichtzier,
Nissim Mossek, Marie Jose Kanga, and Yuval Blankovsky
The art project ritesinstitute is an independent institution devoted to free education, research, and the production of associations, variant ideas, events, and actions. We inquire into the production of identities. We focus on the points of contact between what is different. We examine and manipulate imagery. We subvert and posit actions. We inspect, open, and research borders. Our central method in this context is the creation of international and a-national connections between artists, activists, and theorists.
