archive – hazira

Autumn Cult

Each year, it is our custom to turn our gaze to the night sky and discover prophecies, images, and reflections for the impending Autumn Cult. The heavens are adorned with wondrous expressions of creative processes: worlds obliterated in violent explosions, birthing new generations of materials in the cosmos; clouds where star nurseries flourish; and, of course, black holes, steeped in their secrets and gothic promises.
This year, the upward glance reveals ballistic downpours and the resolute flight of war machines. The stars are veiled by black clouds of despair and soot. If only we could cleanse our vision of fear and helplessness. However, this is a time of terror and the collapse of language. The images are coerced, and imagination feels nearly neutralized under the weight of disillusionment which the future may conceal.
We have little to offer in further descriptions of pain and bleeding. We will not attempt to justify the existence of this festival with these opening words, nor will we declare about “the vital role of culture during wartime.” On the contrary, artistic action contracts and trembles in the face of suffering.
We are producing this festival for the same reason that the Squill grows.
We strive to avoid being crushed between escapism and activism, yet we agree to sip from the strange blend of pain and beauty, violence and compassion. In the biological clock of the HaZira Theatre, autumn brings with it the Autumn Cult. As the world outside becomes increasingly colder, it is time to return from the summer’s events to the intimacy of the halls, moving from the blinding brightness of summer into the darkness of the stage. This is the epicenter of our activity in the HaZira Theatre, the moment in the year to ignite the metaphorical flame that will accompany us into the next season.
Autumn is a season of twilight, perfectly suited to our work in HaZira: interdisciplinary art—art of twilight. It is also the time when the city’s schools commence their annual cycle, this is an opportunity to witness vital art that is echoing the voice of the moment, and to be filled with the spirit of intrigue as the academic year begins.
We invite you to witness several events within the festival and experience the unfolding of the Autumn Cult and its energy accumulating from night to night.

Autumn Cult 2024 offers a complex experience. It is not a festival of encouragement or celebration. It is a festival of fierce storms performed by intense, dedicated artists. Some develop their works through confrontation, friction, and struggle—within personal, internal, political, and historical realities. Others grapple with Western civilization trying to shatter its identity characteristics. Some strive to undermine phenomena in an attempt to momentarily capture a fragment of the sublime.

Auto

Ofer Laufer is an artist and craftsman who builds structures, objects, and machines. The artifacts he produces with his own hands, carry a very personal, technical, and poetic signature. He often places his sculptures in public spaces, creating interventions that respond to and influence the environment. Additionally, he works as a lighting and set designer, and as a performer who collaborates with artists in the fields of theater, music, and dance.

As someone who regularly embarks on adventures in Israel and abroad, Laufer operates as a hunter-gatherer, collecting intense, radical, and poetic experiences in the wild. These are gathered during arduous physical journeys, minimizing dependence on resources, sometimes to the point of survival. In his interaction with nature and the environment, he examines various boundaries, inviting encounters with human helplessness. Thus, images are crafted into sculptural, performative, and theatrical actions. For Laufer, there is no real separation between life and artistic activity; one is intertwined with and nourishes the other.

A few years ago, Laufer relocated his life to a small caravan, the iconic Hymer Motorhome model mounted on a Mitsubishi L300. Through this he redefines the ways in which he resists and submits to life in the Israeli urban-urban-capitalist space. Living in the caravan is a way to escape the clutches of real estate straight into the pseudo-wild nature of national parks or the silence of the coastline, which is likely to be disturbed by a group of drunk teenagers or a curious security guard of a nearby construction site. It is a solitary lifestyle that allows nomadic wandering, settling in nature or on the outskirts of the city. Freedom is great, seemingly. The physical-mystical relationship between Laufer and the caravan is akin to the mythical bond between a rider and his horse. They move in an intimacy that at its peak reaches complete symbiosis.

At the center of the work Auto is a life-size model of the caravan Laufer lives in. Placing it on the theater stage is an invitation to embark on an adventure. The vehicle is surrounded by artificial natural forces and elements: water, fire, smoke, and earth, as the stage transforms into a living and active landscape. It is a fantastic journey through natural phenomena that can only exist in the ephemeral reality of the theater, with its unique means and mechanisms.

Auto will be on display between July 26-August 8, 2024
Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 16:00-20:00
Friday: 12:00-16:00

Entrance will be possible every round hour. Please pre-register here

Spite Your Face

Tamar Harpaz’s installations function as encrypted and shattered mysteries, scenes throughout which clues are scattered. They require the viewer’s presence and gaze, as a forensic investigator collecting findings that can be revealed in a slight shift of perspective or body movement. Her enigmas are constructed from everyday objects embedded within a web of optical and kinetic mechanisms, through which they are reflected, replicated, and sometimes heard. Viewers wander between the physical presence of the objects and their reflection, witnessing but not always apprehending the overt manipulation at work, weaving the narrative maze.

Harpaz’s works are based on analog mechanisms yet defiant of the digital age in which they are present. They raise questions about current times, the elusiveness of perceiving reality, and the possibility of articulating tangible truths in a world reflected through screens and simulacra.

The meticulously measured installations are formed by a delicate craft of relationships between materials. They are born from chaotic work processes that begin with the collection of various references: from classic and esoteric cinema, through the history of sciences, to current events and personal experiences. These are brought into the studio, where Harpaz conducts wild experiments of sorts, applying physical forces to different materials. From these, she distills the specific mechanisms and images that will form the puzzle pieces of each of her works.

Spite Your Face is presented in the darkness of Hall 1 of Hazira, a space that, between performances, serves as a storage and workshop. Harpaz preserves the various uses of the space, and the installation appears alongside leftover sets and stored work surfaces. The darkness is pierced by beams of light projected onto colored glass panels, glittering facades that the light extracts their gleaming brightness. Simultaneously, the light reveals a network of reflections through which the backstage of the facade unveils. Like in a sadistic plastic surgeon’s operating room, the effort to suture the facial fragments, to hide and smooth the trauma, is exposed. The glow reveals the fragility of the facade and uncovers the violence and horror involved in maintaining a semblance of unity.

Spite Your Face will be on display in two rounds:
July 5-18, 2024
July 26-August 8, 2024

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 16:00-20:00
Friday: 12:00-16:00

Miraculous Aspects

First and foremost, Ana Wild is an artist of words. She is interested in the connections between language and meaning, and tells stories from the forgotten past and the unknown future. Her works explore various forms of learning and knowledge, appearing as text, object, or event. They offer mythologies that wander in peculiar ways to the present, where Wild presents how worlds can be created ex nihilo, out of nothing. Her creative practice stems from meticulous yet playful research, gathered and embodied in a performative action, where the transfer of knowledge takes on a wondrous artistic form of shared imagination.

Her new work, Miraculous Aspects, deals with a moment of revelation. During one of Moses’ wanderings in the land of Midian, he encounters a vision: a burning bush that is not consumed, from which a divine voice emerges. This is the moment when Moses becomes a prophet, and the starting point for the redemption story of an entire people. In Wild’s work, the burning bush is a destination in a journey that can be reached through a surrender to the miraculous dimension, inviting us to believe.

Out of the darkness of the everyday and the obscurity of reality, Wild creates illusions born from words and sounds, all existing in the black void of the theater. Bodiless voices resonate throughout the space, creating environments, actions, and scenes within it. By stripping away the visual elements of the stage and relinquishing what is seen, space is created for the non-visual image formed by language, allowing a story of faith and imagination. At a certain place in the desert, at a specific time of day, the sun sets behind the mountain, illuminating a rock. There, you may believe the bush is burning, beyond the event horizon.

The dark theater is a space of consciousness where the body merges with the spirit, and the seen with the imagined. Here, the audience gathers for a shared moment of revelation, invited to say yes: yes to the make-believe, yes to the wonder, yes to being together.

*Please note that the work is in Hebrew with no translation

Miraculous Aspects will be on display between July 5-18, 2024

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: 16:00-20:00
Friday: 12:00-16:00

Entrance will be possible every half an hour

DELUSIONS 07

Concert no. 07 in the Deluziot series comes in an international metal edition, with two heavy sets of varying speeds:

ATONIA

After a debut performance at Roadburn – one of Europe’s prominent heavy music festivals – the collaboration of vocalist Tomer Damsky with the Belgian band Wyatt E lands in Jerusalem. With music inspired by Babylonian mythology, scales from the Near and Far East, or “music for ancient empires” as they put it, Wyatt E have made a global mark with their atmospheric Doom soundscapes. Upon this sonic foundation, Damsky overlays vocal maneuvers from Middle Eastern ornamentation to screeches, uttering ancient texts in Hebrew and Latin. After an acclaimed split single and their full Live at Roadburn record, ATONIA come to shake the stage of HaZira with a second-ever performance.

Sebastien Von Landau: Guitar, synths, and vocals

Stephane Rondia: Bass and electronics

Jonas Sanders: Drums

Tomer Damsky: Vocals and electronics

ATAMEO

Between bursts of noisy aggression and lamentations over the death of the universe, the local post-hardcore group ATAMEO arrives at Deluziot for a special set. In the band’s debut album, released in 2022 via Zegema Beach and Middle-Man Records, each track is a journey through fractured spaces both musical and metaphysical.

Ori Gutholtz: Bass and lead vocals

Tzahi Halimi: Guitar and vocals

Ziv Peretz: Guitar and vocals

Itay Bitton: Drums

Delusions 01

The opening concert of “Delusions” is curated by ״Excessive״ collective, who invited artists to explore the artful wiles of the audio-visual world. Each performance piece offers a different experience, trying to probe and defy the boundaries between the intangible vision of our mind and the palpably physical world out there.

WACKELKONTAKT / AQUADOME #2: A Crack in the Tank

During the seventies a series of experiments were conducted in Germany to investigate the nature of telepathy. The subjects were seated in separate rooms under a prolonged exposure to red light and white noise, wearing glasses with white plastic lenses. With open eyes and blurry vision, they were asked to communicate graphic content to one another using the power of their minds. The conclusions of the experiment remained ambiguous. But whether telepathy is real or not, the audiovisual trio WACKELKONTAKT was artistically triggered by the experiment itself. Equipping their audience with A-D glasses and exposing them to flashing lights and loud sounds, they created a new form of an artistic experience. A Crack in the Tank is the second part of the Aquadome trilogy, which combines sound, lighting, video clips and live musical performance. Amidst the forceful roar of nature crashing against the noise of the amplifiers in the room, the band delves into mystical poetics, following the mysterious ways in which fluid elements transform from a single frequency into noise, and from noise into the sound of silence.

* The show uses flashing lights and loud sounds and is not recommended for people suffering from or prone to photosensitive epilepsy.

Genrietta / Cold War

Genrietta is an audiovisual artist born in Moscow. Her aesthetic world evolved through long hours of research and experimentation with analog electronics and personal memories of her (cold) homeland. During the Ukraine war, realizing she may never be back to her old home again, she began writing the music and lyrics of Cold War. Her emotionally charged experience inspired her to create an imaginary cold universe made of screened abstract images, sound played on a modular synthesizer and pieces of poetry read in Russian and English. Seaming together faded shapes of light, frozen textures and melodic patterns of hazy synth-pop, Genrietta invites the audience to venture into her own unique world.

Nimrod Gershoni – A-Hole

Nimrod Gershoni is a multidisciplinary artist creating environments made of performance, video, sound and props. A-Hole is an evolving work that has been shown in galleries, festivals and various alternative venues; it began with an image of the eternal fall based on the 9/11 “Falling Man” and developed into a chilling video of a puppet-theater work, which later further developed into the current state of the show. A-Hole combines live electronic music and digital imagery, in the center of which Gershoni placed his own image eternally falling from a skyscraper. When both, the artist himself and his distorted twin image appear simultaneously on stage and on screen, as in two parallel “realities”, surrounded by what could have been mistaken for the soundtrack of a karaoke night scene in a thriller – the audience may undergo a kind of cognitive dissonance verging on hypnosis.

DELUSIONS

Exploring the human consciousness under the influence of psychoactive substances,Henri Michaux describes the “schizophrenic table” as a table made of infinite additions, excessively dense, brimming over and interminable. Over time it looks like a monstrous clump of wood rather than a table. The top surface of the table, supposedly its useful part, is gradually disappearing; its parts so nebulously connected that it no longer resembles a table but rather a distorted piece of furniture, enclosed within its endless additions, serving some obscure function.

“Delusions” is the new concert program of HaZira, introducing experimental musicians who are taken away from their dark, secluded underground onto the light of stage. Various experimental artists are invited to step out of their natural habitat and venture into the foreign territory of a unique audiovisual environment, provided and supported, technically and artistically, by HaZira and its Tech-Poetry skillful team. Unlike concerts taking places in clubs and basements, this series of performances lends an opportunity to engage in a simultaneously traditional and uncompromising experience, granting music its due time and space from beginning to end.

But the end never comes and the concert will not end with the last note; within eight carefully curated events, a kind of a “schizophrenic table” – unending, broken down in time and space – will be created with continuously added pieces until it will be hardly recognized as a table. Every show will attempt to unfold a state of mind in which these artists adhere to their somewhat “monstrous” art with a multi-layered obsession, without necessarily knowing why they do it, nor how their art will reach its final note, if ever.

Delusions 01

EXCESSIVE DELUSIONS

4.5.23

Delusions 02

To Raise a Thunderstorm by Beating a Drum

24.5.23

Delusions 03

HAZIRA SOUNDSYSTEM

8.6.23

Delusions 04

SUMMER STORM OPENING CONCERT

28.6.23

Delusions 05

FUCK NOISE: MIKVEH

13.7.23

Delusions 06

TALPIOT INDUSTRIAL

24.8.23

Delusions 07

HELLUSIONS

21.9.23

Delusions 08

AUTUMN CULT OPENING CONCERT

31.10.23

Last Action Hero

“Last Action Hero” is a time based, site specific installation conceived for Hazira’s stage. Set in a twilight between exhibition and performance, the work proposes a wandering experience through the stage as the theater’s operating systems are taken over.

The work was created following an extensive research into the Phantasmagoria shows of the 18th-19th century. These shows engaged the advanced scientific knowledge of the time and by utilizing mechanisms of drama and illusion created spectacles of necromancy with the goal of inciting fear and panic in the audience.

In this work Sheizaf draws a line between the spectacles of horror from the Age of Enlightenment where ghosts were presented to the spectators by means of optical illusions and theatrical effects of sound and lighting, to the phantoms which haunt us today: virtual doubles, children of the algorithm, which navigate our lives seamlessly. Once, ghosts appeared at night, bursting from the hidden lamp of a magic lantern; today they emerge in daylight from our backlit screens. By setting the work in the theater, Sheizaf confines the specters back in the hypothetical space of the stage and points at the mechanisms of spectacle that loom behind, pulling the strings of horror.

untitled

“My body knows unheard-of songs…” (Hélène Cixous)

‘untitled’ is a continuation of Zarhy’s exploration into the interweaving of body and sound.

Through a loose tribute to the fluorescent light works of artist Dan Flavin, Zarhy places the work in-between choreography and the visual arts. Together with musician Elad Bardes, the artists create a resonating space of image and sound, where the two elements sustain a continuous contrapunt moving between states of immersion, diversion, and at times audiovisual clashes. The piece asks to cut through language and to dive into the flesh, to operate in the field of the senses, aiming to reverberate in “that” which we all have: a body.

Based on a series of recordings of own physical bodily activities that are sampled and recomposed in real-time, the artists compose a disorienting, fantastic and at times uncanny environment. Through an aesthetic proposition, that is as much a performance, as a live sculpture or a transforming 3D painting, a physical experience takes place, triggering the spectator’s senses and demanding his*her full presence and sensitivity to be an imminent part of this rite.

* Contains nudity.

* Some sections take place in complete darkness.

Aleph

In a diorama of an abstract desert, a young girl is speaking her mother tongue – Hebrew. Her words sound like music, as she describes the place she calls home: it’s hot there, and full of history.

In Aleph, artist Ana Wild offers the learning of a new language to her audience. Starting with simple and concrete things, word by word she builds an increasingly complex lexicon of sound, movement and layered meaning. Learning a language demands opening oneself to another culture, other histories. Here, Ana speaks Hebrew directly to the audience, supported by a projected English translation. Watching, reading and listening, the audience is actively engaged in the acquisition of embodied language, and all the inherited problematics that come with it. Ana is talking about mother-language, about landscape, weather, body and inheritance. In a poetic and playful manner she leads us through cultural ideas and contagious ideology, treading the line between hopelessness and courage. In Aleph she presents herself in the guise of a trickster, a young-girl, battling against the Aleph, the giant, with its own weapon: language itself.