Total Museum of Contemporary Art is presenting Israeli video art, internationally acclaimed yet rarely introduced to Korea, while celebrating the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and Israel. As an exchange program, this exhibition <part I, Afterwards, a story from Israel>, aims to bring not only contemporary art of Israel, but also the core of the sentimentality of Israel as we believe video art is one of the most powerful ways to achieve this intricate artistic expression through the intensive presentation of moving images.

1. <Afterwards : part.1. a story from Israel>
- Date: 6th of March to 1st of April 2012
- Opening Reception: 6th of March 2012, Tuesday, 5pm
- Venue: Total Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA)
- Organiser: TMCA, I-MYU Projects
- Supporter: Israeli Embassy Korea, Arts Council Korea
- Artists: Ben Hagari, Sigalit Landau, Dana Levy, Sharhar Marcus, Uri Nir, Nira Pereg, Miri Segal & Or Even Tov, Shachaf Yaron, Tamir Zadok

2. Special Talk
- Date: 7th of March 2012, 3pm
- Venue: Total Academy lecture room
- Title: Afterwards, Israeli art at times of globalization
- Speaker: Hagit Peleg Rotem (Curator/Journalist)

3. Curatorial, <Afterwards>
“Our art addresses issues” said Bruce Nauman. He means contemporary art is not simply beautiful images, but it casts questions upon audience, which has not been thought of before, in order to suggest a new perspective to see the world. Art is ever more importantly called for today as a powerful communication as it is crucial to understand ourselves and others when we are such closely intertwined politically and economically. This exhibition is a question to the artists from Israel (or the artists are questioning to us) how the artists have felt, reacted and worked after things happened. The title, <Afterwards>, suggests a series of exchange exhibitions between two nations (the next exhibition, Afterwards, will be the Korean artists in Israel) and <a story from Israel> is a subtitle for this show in Korea. This exhibition will bring the world afterwards through the powerful cameras of Israeli artists.

4. Artists and Art Works

Ben Hagari
< A Nous la Liberté (Freedom for Us) >, video and sound projection on a cube, 2011
The installation is centered on a cube projected on the outside and within. The image projected on the four faces of the cube is that of a prison cell. A prisoner, in black-and-white striped costume, his eyes shut, has new eyes painted on his eyelids. Each side is a video sequence comprising still images. Inside the cube is a shadow of a barred window and a silhouette of an old man using his hands to create shadow figures of different animals and plants. The shadow artist Albert Almoznino created the act especially for the installation.

Sigalit Landau
<DeadSee>, video, 11:39 min, 2005
A cord of 250 meters penetrates 500 watermelons forming a 6 meter spiral raft in the saturated salt waters of the Dead Sea. The spiral turns as a whirlpool in reverse from its normal direction. I am floating locked inside the layers of the spiral, between the center and the periphery of the sweet raft. I am reaching out against the direction of the turning raft towards a small area where the fruit is wounded, red, and exposed, like me, to the sting of the salt. The salt solution of the Dead Sea enables everything to float. The spiral gradually becomes a thin green line abandoning the frame. “DeadSee” was first exhibited as part of “The Endless Solution” installation at the Helena Rubinstein pavilion, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, January-May 2005. The film was shot in mid August 2004 in the area of Sodom south of Masada.

Dana Levy
<Silent among us>, single screen video, 5:00 min, 2008
In the video work <Silence among Us>, death - confronted with life - is strikingly present: the silence of the embalmed birds in the glass cages of the Beit Sturman natural history museum, on Kibbutz Ein Harod, is disturbed by an invading flock of white pigeons. These works question the conceptual and institutional procedures concerned with ordering knowledge, classifying nature and crowding it into display cases. (Text from the Haifa Museum of Art)

< Disengagement>, Single Screen Video (vertically installed), 3:03 min, 2005
The work was made during Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in August 2005, and relates to man ́s basic need to place roots in the land and his pain to uproot. The treehouse appears and disappears, emphasizing its temporariness. The work has been digitally composed on the computer. It was made during an artists residency at Hotel Pupik located in the Austrian countryside.
(Text from the videoartworld)

Shahar Marcus
<Homecoming Artist>, video, sound, 4:37 min, 2007
In the video work home coming artist you can see the artist Shahar Marcus driving with his parents in his hometown Petah Tikva which is a small city near Tel Aviv. During the ride the people of the town are being asked do they know or heard about the artist. None of the people know and most of them don’t care about art at all. The drive implicates the gap between the art scene and the common citizen in small towns such as the artist hometown.

<The Curator>, video, sound, 4:25 min, 2011
The video work “The curator” offers a glimpse into “behind the scenes” of the art world which characterize mainly biennials and large festivals. The work is using comic effects and describe the art scene as a detached, elitist bubble. The video is built as a trailer like in the Hollywood film industry. The quick short scenes tells the story. The revelation and the rise of the curator in the art world. Accompanied by a Hollywood style voice over narrator and a fast rhythm editing the work suggests a wider look on issues of our contemporary culture like idolizing celebrities and the instant superstars that are being born every new day. Shahar Marcus

<Freeze>, video, sound, 4:33 min, 2008
In this video art by Shahar Marcus two figures play chess with large chessmen made of ice. The passage of time is marked by the melting of the ice and the movement of the huge hourglass filled with Styrofoam balls that revolves with every move of the game. Inside the hourglass the artist stands like Chronos, the Greek god of time. The rotation of the hourglass, the melting chess pieces, and the alternation of black and white stand out in the location in which the scene was filmed: the plaza outside the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum. This building houses the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the famous War Scroll, which describes the apocalyptic battle between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, when the familiar passage of time will give way to the timescale of myth.

Uri Nir
< Accelerator>, video, sound, 3:51 min, 2011
The movie “Accelerator” was shot in the museum space several weeks before the opening. The filming location extends over two floors: the second level of the Museum (Helena Rubinstein Pavilion) and the basement, over which the occurrence spills. A young child (the artist’s son) is surrounded by thin trickles of sand spurting from the noses of sarcophagi suspended in a circle from the ceiling. The sand drips form a cage-like structure around the child. A hole is gaped in the floor amid the sand mounds accumulating at the foot of the imaginary bars, and the sand shot from above flows to the level below, where it piles up. The scene takes place by the light of a storm of flashes, flickering from translucent white doors installed throughout the level, slicing the dark space with glowing whiteness”.

Nira Pereg
< Sabbath 2008>, video, sound, 7:12 min, 2008
The work Sabbath 2008 documents the closing down of the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem on the eve of the Sabbath. In most cases, public access to these neighborhoods is blocked by means of temporary barriers, which stay put for 24 hours – thus creating an artificial border between these areas and the rest of the city. The barriers are put in place by neighborhood residents, with the approval and support of the Jerusalem municipality and the police. Once the barriers are erected, no cars are allowed into Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. The city is thus topologically transformed into two cities – with and without cars. Building on this ritual, Sabbath 2008 is a photographic ritual that can only be performed at a designated time and in designated places. Although the value of these somewhat rickety barriers may appear above all symbolic, their presence is a source of friction and conflict; they delineate a clear-cut boundary between the sacred and the mundane.

Miri Segal & Or EvenTov
< Sergey B >, video, sound, 19:12 min, 2010
In 2014, Gooble corporation launches ‘Gmind’, a wearable computer activated by users’ thoughts. The film brings the inauguration speech, delivered by Sergey B., co-founder of Gooble. In his speech, he applies the marketing rhetoric characteristic of the high-tech barons of the day - a discourse replete with clichés and self-aggrandizement. Based on technologies under accelerated development, Gmind enables a recorded documentation of each moment of our lives; it is the next step in rendering biological memory redundant. As remembering and forgetting are no longer required, our subjectivity is disrupted.

Shachaf Yaron
VIDEO TRILOGY
Three videos, part of a trilogy inspired by the books of Aharon Appelfeld (Israeli prize winner for literature and holocaust survivor). The trilogy is an attempt to create a dialog between literature and video art and an attempt to give an artistic expression to the subjective experience of the Holocaust victim in the most crucial moment of coping with his tragic fate, like in Appelfeld books.
Professional theater actors participate in the videos and the music for the trilogy is an original score by a famous Israeli musician Karni Postel

<TIME HAS COME>, video, 9:00 min, 2012
Inspired by the book “Badenheim, 1939” by Aharon Appelfeld TIME HAS COME is an artistic expression of the last moments in the life of a Jewish woman in the Holocaust. She awaits her death, and when he comes to take her, she wears the dress he gives her, and dances with his until her end. This is the last moment of innocence, the end of humanity.

<Maria Gross>, video, 4:45 min, 2010
Inspired by the book “An Entire Life” by Aharon Appelfeld. Maria Gross, a beautiful “half breed”, a moment before she’s turned in to the Nazi’s, decides to end her life.

<Another World>, video, 4:46 min, 2011
Inspired by the book “Love, All Of A Sudden” by Aharon Appelfeld. An attempt to visualize the holocaust survivors memory of their dead family members. The memory is fading, sealed and repressed by fear.

Tamir Zadok
<Gaza Canal>, video, sound, installation, 9:00, 2010
Tamir Zadok’s work “Gaza Canal” is constructed like a promotional or propaganda film for an invented project – the digging of the Gaza Canal – a project that allegedly started in the year 2000 and rendered Gaza into an island completely disconnected from Palestine / Israel. This work can be read as offering a futuristic model of peace through global, economic and touristic projects, in the spirit of Shimon Peres’ vision of the “New Middle East”. However, the work actually offers an extreme realization of the long-lasting Israeli fantasy—”to throw all the Arabs into the sea.” The work is a satire that ridicules Israel’s long history of national projects that change the environment and shape it according to a half biblical and half modernist vision.