Installation view, ROHDE CONTEMPORARY,Copenhagen,Denmark.

 

 

This project  based, as a starting point and a source of inspiration, on a book by the Russian draughtsman,Danzig Baldev ,(2005-1935), Drawings from the Gulag. This book contains drawings that describe the life under the Stalin communist regime. The sketches, that were made during Beldev’s military service in the red army, represent the life in the communist labor camps; their educational and jurisdiction system, their investigations and torture methods.This work uses various kinds of mediums, in an interdisciplinary language, that draws inspiration from pop culture, comics, cyber- space and street art. The work implies the existence of a socially- politically charged reality. At the same time, it is about an over- view upon the representation and mediation of that reality using a visual language, related to the contemporary popular culture.The installation in the gallery will contain video works, wall drawings, wooden prints and sketches on paper. 12 video works will be screened within the space, and each will show the artist while spraying one word on a wall, in the streets of Tel Aviv and Copenhagen. The combination of the words will create the sentence: “only through hard labor you will gain the right to be paroled”. This is one of the sentences that appeared in the labor camps in Russia, as part of the educational propaganda of the soviet regime. In this work, the sentence has a double meaning that concerns both the political context and the artistic one. The sentence implies that hard labor takes place during the artistic action; in the act of creating the sentence in large scale stencils and spraying the words across the city and not during real ‘hard work’.The spectators experience the work in two different ways: the one who encounters the work in the street can only see one fragment of it, an image of a word which is experienced as a single enigmatic unit. However, the spectator in the gallery can experience the whole sentence. In a way, the audience in the gallery space has a more powerful position than the person in the street, he becomes the “Big Brother”.