“We Shall Overdraft” is Roy Menachem Markovich’s first comprehensive solo exhibition outside Israel. The installation in the Perla-Mode premises comprises sculptures and short films conceived in his artist’s studio in a run-down neighbourhood in southern Tel Aviv. Found materials and waste such as cardboard, old bread, plastic parts, broken glass, scraps of paper and pieces of metal were used to create a series of small sculptures entitled “Desktop Graves”. The precariously cobbled-together objects are reminiscent of the models of heroic monuments, memorials and commemorative sites that can be found in parks, on street corners and in squares in Israel, with its young and turbulent history.
The short films also play with concealed illusion, with eerie things happening in slapstick-like sketches. Bushes and stones move as if by magic, but obviously not with sophisticated digital video technology. Everything seems fragile, patched together and makeshift. The lovingly crafted model of a sushi bar shatters into a thousand pieces, and a jungle of plastic plants and cardboard stones grows out of a staid office. In the video “Diamonds Forever”, staged in the style of a fake investigative documentary, the artist finds glittering stones in his newly occupied studio. In search of happiness and wealth and spurred on by diamond fever, the artist ultimately destroys his studio in blind greed.
What is real, is everything an illusion? Utopia proves to be a precarious backdrop, and imperfection and inadequacy come to the fore. At this moment of comedy and absurdity, a feeling of sadness and inevitability creeps in.
The video trilogy “And We Worked” examines the mechanisms of documenting and preserving the collective memory of the Holocaust. Elisaveta, Roy’s grandmother and a survivor of the Shoah, attempts to tell her story on camera, from her life in a small Slovakian village to the horrific events in the concentration camp. “And we worked …” deals with human behaviour in the face of a subject that cannot really be processed and is, despite everything and above all, a humorous video that shows human inadequacy, shakes up universal taboos, stirs emotions and moves the viewer.
On Thursday, 2 October, Roy Menachem Markovich will talk to art historian and author Katarina Holländer about his current exhibition at the message salon.