Morendo is a video installation featuring two projections on cinema-size walls and played in a loop. The videos present a testimony of a random and accidental encounter that took place about 2 years ago between a former couple, the divorced parents of the artist.
The meeting of the couple, who had been married for twenty years, took place at a gas station in the city of Tel Aviv, after they had not spoken or seen each other for six years. What first appears as a nostalgic description of the story of their initial romantic acquaintance turns out, towards the end of the film, to be a painful, unplanned, and unexpected encounter. The very short moment of the hasty meeting, which took about 30 seconds in reality, has been intensified, extended to a six-minute film, and even raised to the level of a grotesque scenario. The characters of this alleged play are the artist’s parents, who are photographed in the ex-territories and portrayed in surrealistic and theatrical scenes. The mother is placed on a stage and portrayed as a one-woman band. Whenever she is playing, the scene changes on the opposite screen, which displays the father. He is photographed at a unique solar power station that is currently under construction, located in the south of Israel. This station produces a complex mechanism that enables the generation of electricity by means of encounter between solar mirrors and sun rays. The installation deals with the concepts of separation, time, and memory, using visual and sensual elements – changes of sound, light, and reflections. While the ex-couple continues to maintain detachment in real life, they keep finding themselves together in different art constellations and installations that function as sound machines in space.
MorendoShir Handelsman (IL)
2-channel video installation, 6 min
Shir Handelsman (IL)
Shir Handelsman was born in 1989. He graduated from a BFA program at the Department of Multidisciplinary Art, Shenkar College, in 2018, specializing in video, sound, drawing, sculpture, and installation. In 2017, he attended an exchange program at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD), Paris, France. Shir began his professional career as a musician, saxophone player, and performer. He has participated in various ensembles and jazz orchestras, and composed music for theater productions. After completing his military service as an Excelling Musician (2010), Shir began his BA studies in literature and philosophy at the Tel Aviv University, which he graduated with honors (2013). His works have been exhibited at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg gallery (Denmark), BF Artist Film Festival VIII (UK), Steinhardt Museum of Natural History (Israel), Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and elsewhere. In his works, Shir explores the relations between sound and visual images by using human encounters and situations that become surreal and absurd. He creates damaged sound machines, visual disturbances, and image manipulations in order to expose disruptions that also exist in intimate human relations. He lives and works in Tel Aviv.