archive – hazira

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.

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.

Kairos

Kairos combine fashion, Opera, dance, experimental music and multimedia. inspired by the book ‘Zeros and Ones’ (1997) by the theorist Sadie Plant, the project brings together artists from varied artistic sources: Opera, Performance Art, and the fashion house Baudicca. these artistic worlds create together choreographic sequences and electronic and experimental compositions. in the last few years, artist Anat Ben David had focused on the hybrid adaptation of ‘OpeRaaRt’ – It is structured as a series of ‘vocal images’, designed by dynamic integration of sound, word, and movement. Her live performance and opening for her solo albom “Melech” (2014), establish the collaboration with Stanley Picker Gallery in Kingstone university in London. In 2016-17, Anat was invited to create there her new piece ‘Kairos’.

WACKELKONTAKT: REBIRTHING

The audiovisual show from the ephemeral production house Excessive Productions, which has unraveled eye tissue throughout Europe, imposed post-epileptic terror on the space of Zik.

WACKELKONTAKT deconstruct their selfhood – and together with artist of illusions and characters Dana Tkach, transported the audience into a delightful, triggering, disturbing, and exhilarating sensory experience, introducing questions concerning the link between physical presence and controlled consciousness. The project WACKELKONTAKT comes from Excessive Productions pseudo-cultural umbrella organization. It is co-managed by Tomer Damsky, Eyal Lally Bitton and Marco Milevski Tomasin. Through the aesthetics of excess, multiplicity, intensity and unearthing mechanisms, the three examine physical energy as a driving force and its impact on the viewing experience.

Dance Arena 2015

The festival took place from 14-16/7/2015 at Beit Mazia in Jerusalem.

The “Dance Arena” festival was established in response to the need for an experimental platform for dance. It functioned as a springboard and a significant milestone for many of the country’s best artists. Sahar Azimi, the project’s artistic director, chose to focus on the artist and his or her personal and unique position. The artists were asked to begin a work from scratch, to forget the call for proposals to which they’d responded, and to set out in a new direction. The group of artists in the 2015 Dance Scene came together as a courageous and sensitive circle that exposed all the stages of the creative process and questions of art and craft.

Voice of the Word 2015

In its 15^thyear, the “Voice of the Word” festival, in memory of Mario Kotliar, explored the relationship between textual and performance arts. The festival took place in a unique space, a former television studio, in the bowels of the Jerusalem Theatre. When television burst into modern homes back in the 1960s, it brought public discourse straight into the family living room. For the first time in history, the public was exposed, together, at the same moment in real time, to immediate events and live discussions about current politics and culture. Years later, it seems that no one could have imagined how quickly and effectively screens would creep in and take over our daily lives. Whether in a pocket or on buildings, in the house or car, screens and their partners – the camera lens – accompany us wherever we go. News, “what’s happening” and “what’s being said” no longer takes place far away – it is present in the palm of our hand and constantly accessible.

Voice of the Word 2016 – Windows

During 3 winter nights display windows in the center of Jerusalem transformed into temporary stages, hosting various artists. a collection of performances and installations was adopted to sites, that normally function as a shoe shop, travel agency or a hairdressing salon…
Windows Festival was planed as a walking path that crosses sites and disciplines: Theatre, performance art, dance, spoken word, video art, sound installations and plastic art. the artists were asked to pay attention to the shops, to their daily function and spirit, in order to transform them into the artistic event. this challenge was fascination for the artists, and exciting for the audiences.

Autumn Cult 2017

The first Autumn Cult Festival, took place in October 2017, simultaneously and in collaboration with the School of Visual Theatre’s International Performance Conference. Together, the two events marked the beginning of both the season and the academic year. New productions by young artists were presented during the Cult, alongside productions by veteran artists and international guests, encompassing a rich tapestry of performance works, opera, and contemporary theatre. The festival was hosted at the Zik Group’s studio.