Still Life, 2006
In 2004 and in 2006, I used blackened olive pits for more visceral installation works. Both Behind the Wall (2004) and Still Life (2006) were probably the outcome to my photographic incursions into the Border Land.
In Still Life, the black olive barrels from the kibbutz Beit Hashita used previously in my show Correspondence in Cleveland (1998) and in other exhibition in the country are now sliced up, pouring out black olive pits onto the floor. Above the installation, hovers the Gaze (2002), a disembodied eye staring at the viewer. In this video, sensuous red and black olive landscapes are gathered within undamaged barrels, while in the present installation, these olives leak out from black and red wounded bellies. At the entrance of the show 4 pictures from the series Core 2000, showing olive pits in the barrel which show a uncanny resemblance with an eye. On the wall, the 5 barrel lids of Camera Obscura (2003) where the viewer peeping through a round hole could see Palestinians villages behind barbed wires, a de-facto cultural separation now reinforced by concrete fences during the construction of the Separation Wall around Jerusalem in 2003.
