The Alfa Balloon is a giant balloon, two meters in diameter, attached to a system of monitors and sensors. It follows visitors in the space by means of a concealed robot, while disrupting their movement and blocking their field of vision. The movement of the ball is accompanied by a warning sound which grows in volume the closer it comes to the visitor, and intensifies the feeling of discomfort. The work deals with tactics of control, surveillance and supervision through technology. It draws its inspiration from the television series “The Prisoner,” which was broadcast in the 1960’s, and among other things is remembered today because of the disturbing image of a man running along the sea shore chased by a giant white ball. Such a threat is ridiculed in light of the fact that the giant ball is full of air, creating an ironic gap between the image created by the inflated object and its content.
Neo-Bartalism, Solo Exhibition, 2017
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Neo-Bartalism integrates techniques of new media – surveillance technologies, robotics, image processing and machine learning – with videos and physical objects produced with low-tech tehnologies. This is in many ways a nihilistic exhibition, but poetic and full of humor. It deals defiantly with mechanisms of control and propaganda, with capitalist mechanisms, with feminism, religion, stereotypes of the Israeli character, and with the Arab-Israeli conflict. It presents clichés and at the same time ridicules them and deconstructs them to a level that is empty of content. It is at once political and a-political, concrete and abstract, deals with global issues and touches on the most delicate facets of social and political reality in Israel.