Tirtza Even

A three-part multichannel installation, depicting, through subtle digital disruptions and a layered polyphony of testimonies, the emotional impact of climate change on individual lives.

Parallel tells the story of the fissure–the modes of blindness and longing, of not seeing and being unseen—at the heart of an intimate exchange.

The installation is constructed of an elongated strip of portraits which can be viewed from both front and back.

At an almost undetectable speed, the two rows of portraits–those who are facing us and those who are not–drift along, and then off of the edge of the screen. New pairs continue to slip in endlessly.

Work in progress demo at Rencontres Internationales, Paris, 2024

‘2nd Person’ is a multi-channel video installation.

The sonic fabric of '2nd Person' is formed through the interweaving of a large number of women’s voices. The speakers, all women I have personally and intimately known at various points in my life, talk with me about loss, aging, death, motherhood, love, coming of age.

Visual shifts within images spatially strung together and projected on a curved elongated screen, correspond to the voices loosely, reactive to the scenes and landscapes invoked by the women’s stories, and to the tonalities, harmonies and emotive range of the voices’ individual and combined music.

The project aggregates individual testimonies that detail the speakers’ nuanced encounters and realizations at various stages in their lives. Collected together, the recorded moments constitute a totality founded on--and unraveled by--their personal experience as women.

Installation outline and demo

VDB distribution page

Made in collaboration with Nadav Assor, Chronicle of a Fall depicts the experiences of six immigrant cultural-workers from the Middle-East, Africa and Central America. The project’s participants negotiate the meaning of "home" within a precarious socio-political landscape.

To provide an intimate insight into their lives, the speakers all wear body-cameras. In addition, we use a laser-scanner to capture and convert their environments into 3D-'point-clouds'. Thus, a connective space is formed between them, that is both fragmented and in-transit.

Visitors are invited to “step into” and explore the semi-abstract projected spaces. On the backside of hanging screens, they discover close-up videos of the characters' conversations.

For more detailed information, go to Chronicleofafall.org

A review of Chronicle of a Fall at Hyperallergic

Half Truths and Full Lies, a collaboration with Meg McLagan and Elyse Blennerhassett, depicts, through documentation and reenactment, the case of Efrén Paredes Jr., a Latinx man from Michigan, who was sentenced to life without parole in 1989 at age fifteen, for a murder he claims he did not commit.

The multichannel installation takes on a Rashomon-like quality, as divergent accounts of the crime accrue, forming multiple portraits of Efrén.

An online, interactive version of Half Truths and Full Lies, replicating the non-linear gallery viewing experience, was completed in 2023 (see link below).

Installation outline and demo

Online, interactive version of Half Truths and Full Lies

A video installation conceived for a group show entitled “Regarding the Missing Objects”, curated by Ruslana Lichtzier for Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago, Nov. 2022 - Feb 2023.

A review of the show by Kerry Cardoza at the Chicago Reader

A collaborative project with Mary Heinen McPherson (Glover).

Segments from a project depicting Mary Heinen McPherson’s sensory memories of life in prison. Mary’s memories are conjured through images captured on a series of road trips to locations significant to her past and present life.

The story of one apartment building in Jerusalem exposes the repressive and damaging manifestations of Israel’s psychological/national concept of Defense.

Land Mine, a feature length experimental documentary, is constructed as a series of partial depictions of the building's tenants. Together, the residents' stories form a mirror image to a society which is prey to the violence of its own defense mechanisms: its Land Mines.

Land Mine had its world premiere at the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight Festival (NY).

SELECTED REVIEWS:

Variety: MOMA’s Doc Fortnight 2019 Sets Full Slate

Criterion: Five Films To See at Doc Fortnight 2019

Filmfestivals.com: New York: Doc Fortnight 2019

Modern Times: Defense Mechanisms

Cine-File: Tirtza Even’s Land Mine

Press Kit (information on crew members, list of past screenings and more)

Conversation on Land Mine hosted by the ‘Partial Witness’ exhibition

Heure Exquise! distribution page

VDB distribution page

Natural Life, produced in conjunction with the legal efforts of the Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle (LODL), is a three fold experimental documentary comprised of a single channel video (77 min.), a gallery installation and an interactive archive. The piece challenges inequities in the juvenile justice system by depicting, through documentation and reenactment, the stories of five individuals who were incarcerated for life without parole (natural life) for crimes they committed as youth. The youthful status and/or lesser culpability of these youths, their background and the circumstances leading to their crime, as well as their potential for rehabilitation, were not taken into account at any point in the charging and sentencing process. The five were sentenced to remain in prison till they die.

Discussion Guide

Press Kit (selected reviews, festivals, list of crew members and participants, and more)

A moment from the single-channel version

Interactive archive demo

Installation outline

Heure Exquise! distribution page

VDB distribution page

Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains (2009) is the last fold in an on-going documentary project reflecting on encounters taking place in Palestine and spanning more than ten years as well as a wide range of media (from single channel video, CD-ROM, website, to written text, 3-D animation, and interactive installation). The various media reflect and undermine each other's reports, detecting gaps, contradiction and bias in the perception and mediation of the primary experiences or encounters that set the trail of records in motion. Together they form a shifting history not only of the experiences themselves, but of each moment's viewing and of its articulation: a manifold document that questions the stability of any perception, record, or rendering of such encounters.

A short selection of scenes

Sentence Worn is a collaborative animation/video installation investigating the embodied, physical experience of living through, and returning from, 27 years of incarceration, as told by Mary Heinen (Glover), the project’s Producer/Co-director and protagonist.

Screen fabrication by Ivan Martinez

In 2000 Justin Gibson, age 15, was convicted of the murder of his grandmother and was sentenced to life without parole at a Michigan State Correctional Facility.

All Day is a 3-D animation / experimental documentary video project, made in collaboration with Gibson, and telling his fictional interpretation of the story of his crime and ensuing incarceration, as well as his personal rendering of stories extracted from interviews with fellow inmates regarding their own prison experience. Our aim is to read the experience of captivity within (and against) the overlapping contexts of apathy, apprehension, alienation, and a denial of hope.

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Icarus was shot in Cartagena, Spain. The city of Cartagena, situated on the Mediterranean coast, has been the site of the rise and fall — and of manifestations of power and disempowerment — for an array of cultures and regimes. Currently a small peripheral town, inhabited in large part by an emigrant community of Moroccan day-workers, it is bent on extending the tourist and cultural appeal by means of a supervised series of house demolitions in sites intermittently dispersed in the town’s center, to be re-occupied in the near future by luxurious apartment hotels. At the time of Icarus’ production, the various signs of power and of entropy, of centrality and marginality, whether military, political, ethnic, economic, cultural or social, were eclectically displayed in the city’s layered and fractured architecture and human arena.

The edited video for Icarus consists of a 12 min. reverse pan — an impossible re-turn or “temporal wipe” — across circular sites shot in Cartagena, each stitched together out of patches, spatial and temporal, of the city’s urban landscape. The act of weaving in and out of scenes and of moments betrays unseen cracks into which various characters slide, in which they converge, or disappear. The landscape thus peels and unfolds, turning back but never arriving at some intact moment of aspiration and of origin. The piece is formally engaged with navigating a fragmented landscape, using the camera’s movement as a means to comment upon — or occupy and thereby interrupt — that landscape’s social and political determinants.

A demo of the installation

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Sign Discourse, a documentary made in collaboration with Haggith Gor-Ziv concerning people living with hearing disabilities, consists of approximately 40 minutes of talking heads only.

These talking heads, however, do not talk. They sign, and the sounds they emit as they sign have no intentional signifying power and no correlation to the gestures producing the discourse.

The arbitrary, incidental, sounds emitted by the gestures of our interviewees are what creates for hearing viewers — and the hearing are those targeted (and yet linguistically excluded) by the film — the proximity to the experience of being Deaf. We hear sounds which, though emitted through speech, fail to signify. 

While offering viewers a glimpse into the world of the Deaf, Sign Discourse thus first and foremost enacts the failure of the hearing audience to enter that world. Through the gestures’ ancillary sounds, we are made to hear the silence — the 'unhearing' — while we listen to, or rather watch (i.e. read), the Deaf recount the story of growing up in a society that excludes them from its own language and, hence, from social conversation.

Sign Discourse on Youtube

Counterface, an interactive installation, is the second distinct iteration of a two-fold video project made with Brian Karl and investigating women's different roles in contemporary Turkish society, with all the complexities, nuances, and contradictions that have developed there among the secular and non-secular, rural and urban, modern and traditional. The first iteration of the project is a 52 min. linear video called Painted Devil. Both versions of the project include portions of interviews with a variety of individuals from a wide range of backgrounds living in Istanbul, integrated with digitally altered scenes from everyday life.

Augmenting the more fragmented, elliptical strategy of the single channel version, the interactive version serves as a fuller reservoir or database allowing greater access to the original stories of the multiple interviewed subjects. The interactive installation consists of a gyroscope-like double-axis structure holding a large dark glass plane within a rotating frame. A two-sided navigable movie is projected on the plane. The two primary sets of scenes mentioned above are separated across the two sides of the plane/movie, each accessed as a single string of images by rotating the structure of the installation up or down on its X axis. Hints of the interviews are visible through cracks within the canvas of outdoor images, and thus provide portals to the unheard voices hiding in the reverse side of the installation.

First few minutes of Painted Devil

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Definition, a collaboration with Brian Karl commissioned by the Jewish Museum (NY), is a two-fold audio-video project comprised of an interactive audio installation in conjunction with two single channel video pieces. The work attempts to represent the multiplicity of definitions of the term “Jewish” in the contemporary United States.

The metaphor of a sign-language “dictionary” serves as a formal access point.

The multiple scenes, which take place in diverse outdoor urban locales, are tied together via the visual device of a continuous tracking shot. The staged moments making up this larger panoramic mosaic consist of a “lexicon” or vocabulary of invented and choreographed physical gestures embedded in the context of otherwise ordinary behaviors by several dozen selected performers. These gestures are indicative of continuing cultural expressions that are embraced or rejected, consciously or not.

Excerpts from the Jewish Identity Project catalogue

Occupied Territory, a CD-ROM and a website, was made in conjunction with the single channel piece, Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing on its Ruins) produced in collaboration with Bosmat Alon (1999). The work displays scenes shot in Deheishe, a refugee camp near Beth-Lehem, Palestine.

Like CityQuilt and Rural (two prior navigable movies) Occupied Territory serves as a prototype for a new type of documentary whereby navigation through a video canvas makes use of space as interface (or metaphor) for the representation of other types of sequences (e.g. temporal, thematic, imaginary).

Motion of the navigable movie is activated by rolling the cursor over the inside edges of the movie's frame.

The landscape navigated seems to be desolate and unoccupied, yet various stories or transformations of scenes, both outdoors and indoors, are slowly revealed within it.

CD-ROM demo

A review of the Occupied Territory website in Le Monde

Article for ‘The Promise, The Land’ show catalogue, O.K Center (Linz)

Maree Makom, the text underlying Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains, consists of a set of short paragraphs that obliquely convey my autobiography as embedded in the images I produced in Palestine during the making of Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing on its Ruins). The printed segments are adjacent to stills taken from the 3D animations constituting Once A Wall, or Ripple Remains, which, in turn, interpret the individual written paragraphs.

The book in its print form is not bound. The pages are contained in a box.

Book on pdf

The material for Kayam Al Hurbano (Existing on its Ruins), a collaboration with Bosmat Alon, was shot in Deheishe, a refugee camp near Beth-Lehem, Palestine, and in the Hebron (Khalil) surroundings, during a period of several months in the summer and fall of 1998. Throughout this period we visited and interviewed many of the refugee camp's dwellers as well as people from the Khalil area whose homes were demolished or had been threatened to be demolished by the Israeli government. Disjointed fragments of stories and comments of individuals from these communities are interwoven with the images shot, and are framed by a short dream-like text, written by Bosmat Alon, reflecting the complexity of our own position as witnesses of the scene -- as invasive, detached or foreign, responsible, guilty and threatened.

Excerpt from Whitney Biennial catalogue, 2002

Heure Exquise! distribution page

Flicker is comprised of three distinct views of an urban, working-class locale, characterized by small interiors, a sparsely furnished, minimal decor and older, worn-down buildings, as well as by an immediate and accessible public area active with street gatherings of groups of various ages.

All three segments were composed by intersecting images of the people's movements with themselves slightly delayed or with other figures' motions, thereby resulting in the formation of new hybrid gestures and spaces. Signs of captivity and confinement vs. gestures indicating escape, acceptance, resistance, all transcending and yet tied to the concrete scenes are thus conveyed through this unique rendering -- the simultaneous interruption and expansion -- of spaces and motion. The abstracted sound accompanying the piece punctuates and reinforces a continuity within the highly segmented visuals.

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Slip, an interactive video installation made in collaboration with Sha Xin Wei, was shot at Peachtree Pine Homeless Shelter in Atlanta, Georgia.

The videotaped figures projected on the glass screen are trapped in a view that cannot be transcended or expanded. With the turn of the screen/frame/camera, a glimpse at the people hidden in seams fracturing what appears to be an empty space is hinted at and frustrated. The scene's resolution expands upon slowing down, with the focusing of the quest for signs of human presence, exposing, however, only faint figures turned away and quickly receding into the background.

Our goal in conceiving this project is to investigate concepts such as on and off limits (on and off screen) or private/public territory, by challenging the depth of the installation space itself (vs. the two dimensions of the projected screen) as well as that of the recorded space (vs. video frame), and challenging, therefore, their implicit promise of access to a multiplicity of points of view, to additional information, to the desired freedom of vision, movement and touch.

While keeping within a prescribed, conventional and legitimized (even legalized) center, the various aspects of vision (projection vs. perception; creation vs. discovery) seem to overlap, like the screen, the frame and the image. And yet, the viewer's glance and motion sideways, matched by the motion of screen/frame/image, reveals only pre-existing gaps, and one's ultimate confinement to a single, blind and imprisoned perspective, in which what is off screen is also off limits.

More detailed documentation of the project at Cornell University Library

A set of navigable interactive videos on CD-ROM, programmed to allow the user to navigate a canvas of indoor and outdoor scenes of New York (CityQuilt), or visit in depth four layers of image sequences shot across rural USA (Rural).

Heure Exquise! distribution flyer

Far, Along, a collaboration with Brian Karl, is an attempt to look at memory traces of World War II as they interpret, rewrite and yet gradually depart from the constantly evolving present day Germany. The project constructs a document which both questions and reflects the overlaps and contradictions between the experience of private individuals on both sides of the division of "German" and "Jewish", as well as unpacks the unresolved stereotypes and seemingly integrated units or groups that this division breeds.

The goal of the work is to undermine the representation of even such a dramatic event as the Holocaust crystallizing into an all too familiar, nearly static history. In an oblique, nuanced manner, relying on almost imperceptible, digitally effected disruptions of images and sound of everyday scenes, we are attempting to elicit and tease out those marks of the past which might otherwise remain latent but which transform and interrupt any innocent view of contemporary Germany.

A review of the Jewish Museum (NY) acquisition of Far, Along

Article by Ayala Amir for the ‘Liquid Spaces’ show catalogue, Israel Museum (Jerusalem)

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In conceiving Pan I wanted to convey the off-screen as a positive physical space existing between two section of an image: a space the referent at first denies (through the flow of movement from one section of the image to another); then exposes (as the camera begins to move), and which is finally maintained dialectically in the tension between the indices of the absent space and those of the physical proximity within the frame of the two scenes comprising the overall image. The frustration of the illusion of an off-screen space, acquires meaning through the constant motion of the seated couple into the void, and final entrance of the solitary figure into screen right. Through the use of a formal device (i.e. a pan, a split screen) I impose a story over the obtuse images of the documented material. The form becomes the plot; it is an event the figures undergo.

Museum of Modern Art collection page

A review of Pan at the New Yorker