Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

Nir Evron

A Free Moment

Film expérimental | 35mm | noir et blanc | 4:0 | Israel | 2011

" A Free Moment was made in Tell el-Full in Jerusalem. The site, which before 1967 was in Jordan, had been chosen as the location for King Hussein?s summer palace. The framework of the palace was constructed before the occupation of East Jerusalem after the Six Day War and it remains a kind of ruin to this day. Evron gained access to the site and eventually determined to make a film within the building with a camera which would simultaneously perform three operations: it would pan in a 360 degree circle; it would tilt in another 360 degree circle, and it would undertake these two motions while traveling along a dolly track on a north-south axis. In other words, the camera would exhaust the repertoire of its mechanical motions and ?see? everything possible around it. The film also would last four minutes, being the length of one 400 foot film cartridge. In order to make this work, Evron worked with technical advisors to construct a track within the shell of the abandoned 1967 palace, and to programme the motions of the camera. The resulting film begins simply enough, with a view over Jerusalem. It is a view from a summit, and one we associate with notions of control and ownership ? the kind of view that we could well expect a king to enjoy from a palace. We would not be surprised if this view were accompanied or followed by a panoramic movement, so that the landscape all around was surveyed, but as Evron?s camera begins its journey, a completely unfamiliar motion begins since the camera starts looking up and around while moving backwards. Soon enough it points towards the rough concrete blocks of the floor above it, which, because of the way they are filmed, seem to lose their material identity. It seems as if we are looking down at a strange landscape, rather than upwards at rough breezeblocks. A few seconds later, the initial viewpoint out to the city reappears, but this time it is inverted. As the camera continues its backwards journey, it begins to record the track on which it is moving and the floor beneath the track, another rough surface that appears like a desert or lunar surface. Eventually the motion stops with a return to the orientation with which the film opens. ‏Evron?s film relates to the late 1960s in more ways than the date of the palace: this was the moment of structuralist film, when artists such as Michael Snow, Anthony McCall, Paul Sharits and others began to interrogate the apparatus of cinema, looking at the nature of a zoom or panning movement, the conical shape of a projected film, and the material properties of celluloid. A Free Moment is deeply indebted to this legacy and throughout the film, however unworldly the motion of the camera, Evron emphasizes the construction that has to be in place for this motion to occur: the camera necessarily records the track along which it moves, and even the mechanism between it and the track. But what is much more interesting than its structuralist credentials is the way Evron deploys these formal ideas in order to re-imagine the site in which he works. Through its elaborate structures, the film produces another way of seeing and thinking about the space in which it is set. We are not invited to ?see? Jerusalem as the Jordanian king once hoped to see it, nor as many Israelis now hope to see it, panning around a ?united Jerusalem?, all of which is hoped will remain under Israeli control. Instead, we are invited to loosen our ways of looking at architecture and landscape, to turn our way of looking on its head. The invitation and utopianism of this work is the idea that this way of looking might mean thinking about the city and its future in completely new ways. " excerpt from a text by Mark Godfrey

Nir Evron, born 1974 is a video artist and film maker. He graduated from the Bezelel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2001 and completed a MFA degree at The Slade School of Art in London in 2005. Since then he exhibited extensively in Europe and Israel. He participated in the 2010 Berlin Biennale, The Jerusalem Film Festival (2011) where he won The Ostrovsky Family Fund Award for his piece `A Free Moment`. His solo Show `Here-Afrer` at the Tel Aviv Center for Contemporary Art was received with critical acclaim. His video works and film were purchased by museums and private collections, among them The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, The Tel Aviv Museum and The Zabludovicz Collection, London. He teaches video art at the Bezalel Academy and Hamidrasha College.