In ‘Goral Echad’, Amir Fattal seeks to present the relationship between war, trauma and artistic development. Fattal follows the biographies of architects, artists, actors and photographers in order to explore aesthetic style in the context of ethics and politics.
In the main installation 'Light and sound structure' Fattal shows a tower-like object that transmits text from Herzl's utopian novel “Altneuland” converted into morse-code through LED and sound. The structure is a reference to the word 'Tel' as a type of archeological mound created by human occupation and abandonment of a geographical site over many centuries and also to the Hebrew translation of the title of novel; Tel-Aviv.
Different narrative of utopian ideas and artistic movements especially in Germany in the first half of the 20th century are put into question and Fattal is following the parallel activity of artists who left Germany and artists in the service of German propaganda.
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or example, in ’Marleni’; where Fattal embedded together into one portrait Lenny Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich, two women artist who began their career in 1920s in Berlin. While Dietrich had left Nazi Germany, moved to USA and performed during the war in front of American troops fighting her own country, Riefenstahl will be remembered forever as the artist whom enlisted her skills to harness the Nazi propaganda – declaration that won’t lose its validity even in the postwar years in Riefenstahl later projects, such as the project she made with Nuba tribe in Sudan. In ‘Goral Echad’, Fattal suggests a glance of the aesthetics of morality as it historically mediated by the winning side and the historical events that shaped modernism especially in the context of Israel and the Bauhaus.
Besides Lenny Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich, Fattal dialogues with the work of architects Erich Mendelssohn and Albert Speer, artists Marcel Duchamp and Sepp Hilz, photographer Hugo Jaeger and actress Jane Fonda who all took different moral paths under a wartime situations.
Amir Fattal lives and works in Berlin. He won numerous awards (among them the Young Artist Award from the Senat of Berlin for 2010 and the GASAG foerder prize 2008) and participated in many group exhibitions (among them is this years Moscow Biennale) and solo shows around the world. This is the first solo show of the artist in Israel and the last exhibition to be held at ST-ART residence. Curator – Liora Belford
