ROTEM LINIAL
VIDEOS / FILMS / PROJECTIONS
CHIASMUS
NETWORKS / EVENTS / COLLABORATIONS
PRINT PROJECTS / WRITING
Two-channel video, sound, 60 minutes.
Click for complete right-to-left video.
Chiasmus is presented looped and viewing may begin at any point in the video.
CHIASMUS is a two-channel still-life video presented in a custom-built space bisected by a screen, creating two “mirrored” screening rooms. The two, looped, hour-long videos share a single audio track that is made up of recorded oral history interviews that interrogate the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Family members speak about fears that were passed onto them from their parents — a fear of dogs derived from one grandmother’s experiences during the Holocaust in Poland; another grandmother’s fear of birds rooted in stories of birds attacking the eyes of her family members in Morocco. Translating captions are embedded in the still-life sets.
The videos shown in both screening rooms are nearly identical. Both are one-shot pans shot on the same circular set, which describes a cluttered studio desk. The camera completes a full circular pan every ten minutes, meaning that in each screening room one can see six full 360º sweeps over the set. However, the set changes slightly with each pan. A family photograph is now a reproduction of Goya etching; a closed eye opened; a book is open to a different page; a clock shows a different time. The audience’s attempt to link narrated stories and image become a work of continual reinterpretation with each modification to the set.
This process is further complicated by the fact that the video in one screening room tracks left-to-right and in the other right-to-left. A viewer’s sense of the work’s meaning, built up by connecting one video’s succeeding elements, is challenged when the same set is “read” from the opposite direction in the second screening room. The audience’s projection of narrative and causality are foregrounded as, with each pan, the repeating soundtrack is decoded differently as it is paired with slightly different sequences of minutely altered visual clues.
The project takes its name from the rhetorical device chiasmus:
A B
\ /
/ \
B A
\ /
/ \
B A
Custom-built screening space bisected by a screen, exterior.
Diagram illustrating custom screening. Screening rooms are accessed through seperate enterances. The two spaces and their entrances mirror each other.
Screenshots taken at 10 minute intervals showing some of the changes that occur bewteen pans.
Screenshots taken at 10 minute intervals showing some of the changes that occur bewteen pans.
CHIASMUS
ORPHEUS, ORPHEUS
TRANSFORM - DEAD SEA
SHE MEANT TROUBLE
PROJECTORS/SCREENS
NETWORKS / EVENTS / COLLABORATIONS
CINEMA BALASH
POSTCARDS
NUMINOSUM
PRINT PROJECTS / WRITING
FOR X
MACHOL (THE DANCE)
STATIC: BLANK SCREENS, SCREEN REFUSALS AND THE MONOCHROME MOVING-IMAGE
COLOR FILM / FILM COLOR (IN SANFORD WURMFELD COLOR VISIONS 1966-2013)
STRANGE STONES AND GOOD NEIGHBORS [WITH JESSE LOCKARD] (IN “AND A RIVER WENT OUT OF EDEN”, MAAYAN ELYAKIM)
EYE OF THE CYCLOPS [HEBREW]