TIME CONTAINER, 2013

Diptych, Two Channel HD-Video, 7'41"

 

Time Container is a diptych – two parts presented as a single unit. This video is more narrative and documentary, though very painterly too. It was filmed during a visit to Ashdod port by the artist and his father, who had been a seaman as a young man. While one screen records the father's encounter with memories of the past and the contemporary world of ships, another screen displays tremendously powerful cranes moving slowly across the screen. The former sailor's wonderment at the sea's power and the huge vessels matches the photographer's admiration of the colourful cranes and geometrically arranged containers. Throughout the work there is a play of oppositions: between the monochromatic screen and the colour screen at the work's start and end; between a static abstract picture and teeming movement and a human story; between the open sea and the cargo quays.

The port is a point along a route of global movement - it connects past and present, father and son. It is also - as the film says of European ports - the country's backyard.

The visual beauty pervading the film shifts it away from contemporary contexts and links it to traditional paintings of harbours, and modernism's machine aesthetics. [Dalia Manor]