In the video ‘Background noise’, we see a static shot of the oversized face of the artist, who tries, along many static sequences ("failures" included), to control the blinking of his eyes caused by the explosions. A newspaper interview with an Israeli pilot accompanies this filmed performance. The pilot describes an air raid and what he feels when he drops bombs on a target. Those two deliberately mechanized accounts of the conflict, a motionless, apathetic face on one side, and terse, dispassionate answers devoid of questions on the other, sound a bit like a summary of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On one side, no exit ; on the other side, a monologue…
text by Taysir Batniji
