The exhibition “We Shall Overdraft” comprises sculptures and short films that were conceived and filmed in Roy Menachem Markovich’s living/studio space – a collapsing garage in a neighbourhood of rickety repair shops and artists’ studios in the south of Tel Aviv.
A series of “Desktop Graves” were created, small sculptures made from found materials and waste such as cardboard, old bread, pieces of plastic, broken glass or pieces of metal. The precariously assembled objects serve as models of heroic monuments and memorials that can be found everywhere in Israel with its turbulent history, in parks, on street corners and in squares.
The videos also play with concealed illusion. Eerie things happen in short, slapstick-like sketches: bushes and stones move by ghostly hands, but obviously not with sophisticated digital video technology. Everything appears fragile, patched together and makeshift. The lovingly crafted model of a sushi bar shatters into a thousand pieces, a bland office becomes a jungle of plastic plants and cardboard bricks.
In the video “Diamonds Forever”, staged in the style of an investigative fake documentary, the protagonist, the artist himself, finds glittering stones in his newly occupied studio. The artist, in search of happiness and wealth and fuelled by diamond fever, finally destroys his studio in blind greed.
What is real, is it all illusion? Utopia proves to be a precarious backdrop. The imperfect and inadequate emerge. A sense of sadness and inevitability creeps in alongside the comedy and absurdity.
The video trilogy “And We Worked” examines the mechanisms of documenting and preserving the collective memory of the Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Elisaveta, Roy’s grandmother, tries to tell her story from life in the small Slovakian village to the terrible events in the concentration camp in front of the camera. But the old woman’s life story remains unheard and disappears behind the routine and institutionalisation of the culture of remembrance of the Israeli trauma.
On Tuesday, 2 October, Roy Menachem Markovich will talk to art historian and author Katarina Holländer about his current exhibition and life as an artist in Tel Aviv.
“We Shall Overdraft” is Roy Menachem Markovich’s (born 1979 in Tel Aviv) first comprehensive solo exhibition outside of Israel.