Installation view, Rohde Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark.

 

Action Number 7 takes Danzig Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag as its starting point. The book’s depictions of Soviet labor camps inform an installation that combines video, wall drawings, wood prints, and sketches with a visual language drawn from pop culture, comics, digital culture, and street art.

 

Twelve videos show Tati spraying individual words on walls in Tel Aviv and Copenhagen. Together, they form the sentence “only through hard labor you will gain the right to be paroled,” a slogan associated with the camps’ propaganda. Recreated through large stencils and repeated actions across the city, the phrase connects political coercion with the labor of making art.

 

The work offers two different perspectives. A passerby encounters an isolated word, an enigmatic fragment without its context. In the gallery, viewers see the complete sentence and the actions that produced it. This broader view places them in a position of surveillance, becoming the work’s “Big Brother.”