Group of dreams and hunting - Zamir Shetz

Curator: Tal Ben-Zvi

A video installation functioning as a symbolic territory, as a monument for the artist's place of childhood - Kibbutz Kinneret. The basalt rocks that were brought from this mythological kibbutz constitute the framework within which the biographical, familial and kibbutz institutes are dismantled to their components. At the center there is the patriarchal father institute - the male institutes that are capable of organizing, institutionalizing, disciplining and subordinating the artist's life and the public space in which it takes place, as long as he is present in the kibbutz, and as long as he is absent from it. On the other side there is the mother climbing trees, a meaningless or a functional act within the space in which she lives.

The kibbutz, Zionist territory is revealed as a psychoanalytical field of action in which the father institute and the mother figure dominate the territory and mark it. The hunter, subject to functional logic, uses the mother, the father, anything within this territory, to establish his existence, but the eclectic hunting troubles him and he cannot find peace for himself.

The group of dreams as a location of intimate self-realization of the artist's hallucinations is also revealed as a kibbutz location. The obsessive collectivity undermines the essence of the dream as a visual language in which the subconscious goes through symbolization into a subjective, personal language of symbols. The obsessive and obstinate hunter goes hunting for the object of his desire - he hangs the group of dreams on his belt and observes them being shattered in front of his eyes, collective dreams but also his own.

The two video films, one of a kibbutz assembly and the other of the climbing mother, are shown simultaneously, marking the division of the territory in space and creating a sequence of contrasts. One film of the kibbutz assembly, in which only men appear and speak - a hegemony text with a position of power and influence, against the video of the climbing mother, which appears in three upside-down monitors and dominates the space like a monument, defined by the basalt rocks. In the artist's text that appears in the exhibition, the mother is characterized as a black Yemenite woman, "from afar I heard them grumble, look at the family of apes, look at the black Yemenite woman, teaching her children to be apes like her, she should go back to the desert, who needs something like that…". The artist identifies himself physically as "a dark-skinned dwarf… a sweep monkey who wants to go back to suckling, to warm himself in your familial nest, Mother, on a tree or in the desert…". The physical otherness, identified with the other according to his own words, causes a distancing from the territory of childhood, while the father institutes, as they are represented in the kibbutz assembly, demand that a decision be made of tribal loyalty and staying.

The assembly video presents a discussion regarding the expiration of the membership in Kibbutz Kinneret. The assembly discusses the expulsion of kibbutz members whose situation is similar to that of the artist: members of Kinneret who are over 28 years and have still not notified the kibbutz whether they are formal members or not, a condition of uncertainty undermining the set of rules underlying the kibbutz logic, as defined by the young members' representative: "There is a young people's course, a course that defines a situation… they have to decide whether they want to be here or they don't want to be here. They can't continue to "float". After all, they can come here tomorrow and decide that it's their right to get a job in the kibbutz." The institutes demand the obedience of the absentee, the members who are indecisive of their belonging/not belonging, an intermediate state on the verge of expulsion or return.

The video film of the kibbutz assembly divides the screen into two windows, one showing the kibbutz assembly as broadcast on an internal video channel to all the kibbutz members, and the second showing the artist's reaction to the assembly. It is a kind of "deaf people's dialogue", in which the assembly takes place within an inner world, shown to a domestic and loyal audience, while the artist's reactions that attempt to dominate the screen remain outside of the text, outside of the discussed territory, outside any position of influence. In front of the television screen showing the kibbutz assembly, small kindergarten chairs are arranged. The socialization process includes within it automatic acceptance of the assembly's values, while the space is surrounded by dozens of clocks that have stopped working. Clocks that despite their fixation show the correct time twice a day, perhaps everything that remains from the absolute truth that appears in the assembly.