Projecting inside the box

Setup

lthough Ronen Sharabani insists his installation Setup is not political, Sharabani is Israeli, the piece includes ideas of land, ownership, and living in a fragile reality, and it features images of buildings from Jerusalem. “I’m exploring the realism of distance,” he said.

Setup began with a view. The artist recalled looking out over a Palestinian village from a vantage point in Israel. In the distance, the tiny community looked shimmery, like a jewel. “As I got closer, the magic collapsed. Am I allowed to enjoy a visual with such a strong underlying concept? These are villages I wouldn’t walk in,” he said. “Sometimes we take the long view about things we think we know about. Sometimes the borders are real, sometimes they aren’t.”

Setup features a table with sand on top of it, and chairs that offer no seating. Images are projected onto the sand and elsewhere in the space. Buildings from Jerusalem are remodeled into a village, which eventually collapses. “The movement of video lets you deceive eyes, emotions, and senses,” he said. Objects emerge from the sand, and others sink into it.

Sharabani studied drawing, painting, and sculpting at the New York Studio School and attended the International School of Art in Italy. Early on, he supported his painting career by working as a commercial video artist in the music, film, and advertising industries in Los Angeles, New York, and his home base in Tel Aviv. Inevitably, the commercial video work began to influence his art. A series of video-based installations have followed, often exploring themes related to his experiences on the shifting grounds of his homeland. These have been exhibited in Tel Aviv; Jerusalem; Holon, Israel; and Austin, Texas. He has participated in Austin’s South by Southwest festival, as well as Tel Aviv’s annual White Night celebration. In late May, he helped create a video sculpture for a dance party in New York.

On his website, Sharabani writes, “In the last few years, I was modeling three-dimensional structures based on simple houses from the surrounding of I Jerusalem. The village has a unique structure and constructed based on simplicity, survival, and contraction. It involves the random nature within the buildings, since the architectural plan and the community needs requires direct reference to the harsh topography.”

“In Israel, a piece of land can have different names, each with different feelings,” he said. There can be layers and layers of conflict, with war above ground and below, where tunnels connect Israeli and Palestinian villages. “When you’re there in a market, buying fruit, you’re just there. But can you be there and make peace?”

For Setup, Sharabani created simulations of buildings, and then exploded them virtually into thousands of buildings. Concrete blocks emerge from the sand, suggesting barricades or borders. Although the connection to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems implied, Sharabani said that when an earlier, linked installation was shown in Austin — a city that has had a large population growth and suffers from a housing shortage — viewers thought the piece, with houses becoming thousands of houses, and villages created and then destroyed, was a statement about the real estate market in their city. “I don’t need to inject ideas,” he said. In Austin, at least, the real estate market supplanted Middle Eastern politics.

— Michael Wade Simpson

“In Israel, a piece of land can have different names, each with different feelings. When you are there in a market, buying fruit, you’re just there. But can you be there and make peace?” — artist Ronen Sharabani