Whiteness and darkness in Israeli memory:

Film screening and discussion

Thursday, 12 March 2020, 20:00 (doors 19:30)

Location: Het Goudblommeke in Papier (La Fleur en Papier Doré)
Cellebroersstraat 55 Rue des Alexiens, 1000 Brussels

An English-speaking event | Free entry (donations are welcome)

In 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from the territory of the newly established Israeli state, a historical event remembered by Palestinians as the ‘Nakba’ (Arabic for catastrophe). Around 400 Palestinian towns and villages were emptied and largely erased, not only physically, but also from the Israeli collective memory. In some places, Jewish immigrants from North African and Middle Eastern countries were settled in the formerly Palestinian villages. However, this history is missing from school textbooks, popular culture, and even from political programs allegedly aimed to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (such as the recent Trump plan).

In this public event of Een Andere Joodse Stem / A Different Jewish Voice, we will highlight these unspoken components of the Palestinian-Israeli history and discuss their erasure from the Israeli collective memory. EAJS members, visual artists Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat, will present their work “Orientation” (2015, 12 min.), and lead a discussion on remembrance and forgetting, their meaning and representation.

Orientation

HD video, color, 16:9, stereo sound, BE, 2015, 12’

Produced by Argos, Centre for Art and Media, Brussels, with the support of VAF and Beursschouwburg, Brussels.

Looking at two locations— the public sculpture White Square commemorating the founders of Tel Aviv, and the shrine of Palestinian village Salame in today’s Israeli Kafar Shalem—Orientation focuses on the ability of architectural material, and of sound and image, to register collective forgetfulness.

Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat (both born in Tel Aviv in 1983) have been working in collaboration for several years and are creating works in the Audiovisual field. They live and work in Brussels.

Sirah and Eitan's practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading of images – moving or still; the relations between spectatorship and history; the temporality of narratives and memory and the material surfaces of image production.

Their works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions and film festivals across Belgium and Europe. They are currently teaching at ERG (École de recherche graphique) in Brussels.