Background Noise

The artist films his oversized face in a fixed shot as he attempts, over several sequences (including "failures"), to control the blinking of his eyes caused by the detonations of shelling on the Gaza border. A text, taken from a daily newspaper, accompanies this filmed performance; it consists of the responses of an Israeli pilot to an interview. He describes an aerial bombardment and what he feels when he drops his bombs on his target. These two accounts of the conflict, deliberately mechanized, on the one hand by the editing of a frozen, apathetic face, and on the other by responses made laconic and dispassionate by the erasure of questions, sound a bit like the synthesis of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. On the one hand, a closed-door session, on the other, a monologue...