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Doom 2 (2007)

International Prize for Performance, Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea, Trento, Italy

The performance is based on various visual languages: dark film, comics, and violent computer games including acts of killing and murder. This work implements a dialogue between stage actions and a video projection. The video presents a hand holding ammunition on a Tel Aviv urban background. The ammunition guns enlarge and walk in an exaggerated and grotesque form, the video shows a chase which grows and accelerates at the end of which in computer games (such as machine computer game DOOM) a corpse appears to float from the water-fountain of the Dizengoff square fountain. This video piece is a continuation of the Tel Aviv city square motive, a local icon, functioning as a place of realization for various events: an illusion of terror, comics, physical vandalism and a parody on urban guerilla actions. The video chapters correspond simultaneously with the live actions made for an audience. The performer, Meir Tati, is seen in his underwear with a large yellow plastic ball on his head. The performance includes another figure who blasts the head layers with work tools placed on the table. Each layer consists of another material which peels off, resembling a morbid self-portrait that exposes and changes all at once. The audience is then exposed to different images of explosions and flares, vandalism and damage as they appear in the exaggerated graphics of computer game esthetics. The violent reality, brought to light within the ties of local urban and playful landscape raises questions on the sublimation of violence in virtual reality, thus presenting a tension between fictional representations and real impulses of violence that surface underneath. This is a personal view, grotesque and comic, on an internal world of instincts, sexuality and a shady unconscious state, as they appear in popular culture's symbols and iconography.

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