News + Recent work

Current works:

Movie Makers + Live Cinema

Cast (50 Best Women series)

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Mania @ Bialik House, TLV

MovieMakers

At Braverman Gallery, Tel Aviv I presents a series of a portable, low-tech moviemakers made of overhead projectors and rotating Plexiglas disks. The moviemakers churn out short movies (24 frames per minute) by placing various 2 or 3D objects on a transparent disk, allowing their various physical qualities to cast images on the adjacent wall. The outcome is a low-capacity-visual-memory machine, which cannot record more than one minute, but that loops infinitely until the objects on the disk are moved. Unlike a cinematic experience, this sculptural configuration makes no attempt to hide its means of production. The equal attention to projector and image seeks to explore the tension between reality and illusion. The works lie between the traditions of nomadic-circuses and today’s DIY media-space. I work with film celluloid, spray paint silhouettes, paper cutouts, and broken glass and mirrors. Technological failures are artificially encouraged to create all sorts of magic and tricks. The brief and often whimsical movies toy with the nature of perception, exposing blind spots and challenging preconception about visual entertainment.

Vanishing Woman @ PS1

Live Cinema Performance

In these performances I’m using my DIY moviemakers to create a series of real-time movies. ‘Vanishing Woman’ deals with magic, trickery, the dawn of cinema and the archives of the Israeli Kibbutz movement.

In ‘Turn Tables’, the musician Grundik (of Grundik and Slava) and I collaborated in jam session of image and sound. During the performance in Tel Aviv, Grundik will appear live via Skype from London, while Cnaani assembles a real-time movie.

Watch short videos

The Sota Project

The Sota Project is a large-scale video installation that reenacts a controversial story from the Talmud. It is a story about jealousy, trust and mortal love that follows an “adulterous” woman who is put on trial by her suspecting husband while her sister helps her fight for her life.

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NEWS + PUBLICATIONS:  FALL 09

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If you read Hebrew, read article art Haaretz magzine –>

Moscow Biennale
The Situation-  Special project at the Moscow Biennale curated by Elizabeth M. Grady
September 25- October 18,
‘The show explore the contemporary moment that is rife with “posts”: Post-Cold War, post-Communist, post 9-11, post-modern, post-colonial, post-national. Blogs embody decentralized communities of identity-shifting “post-ers” who together determine the parameters of everything from what’s hip to the next revolution, offering a faux-reality of democratic access and collectivist practice. But what is left to us when we’re offline? How do we come to terms with the reality of our decidedly non-ideal or falsely idealized cultural, social, political, and even material positions? We must address The Situation.
Gallery on Solyanka, 1/2 ul. Solyanka, bldg. 2, entrance from ul. Zabelina

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Fresh Fruits
September 5th – October 31st 2009
Ten Haaf Projects, Amsterdam

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FORUM DES IMAGE, Paris
Tel-Aviv, le paradoxe
Group exhibition curated by Marie Shek
November 3rd-December 6th, 2009

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Wild Exaggeration
The Grotesque Body in Contemporary Art

Haifa Museum of Art
Opening: July 18, 2009
Curator: Tami Katz-Freiman

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Publications:
A Viewer in Search of Meaning by Noam Segal
A Talmudic story about two sisters attempting to avoid a terrible fate is just the starting point of The Sota Project, Ofri Cnaani’s latest video installation
PROGRAMMA
Programma is a contemporary art magazine dedicated to the arts in Israel. The first issue was launched in September 2009 in Tel Aviv.

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ISRAEL ART NOW BOOK
Editors: Iris Rywkind Ben-Zour and Revital Alcalay

three new fully illustrated catalogs of the exhibitions:
Twister, Wild Exaggeration and The Situation