The Great Hoax
Evil Root (2024)
Jerusalem Artists' House
Curator: Sally Haftel Naveh
Digital print on PVC, microphone stands, cigars, cigar ashes
The Great Hoax alludes to the character of Steve Frankel from the Israeli TV series The Steve Show (2003; produced and directed by Yigal Shilon). The series was inspired by the film The Truman Show, which traces the protagonist's life from infancy to adulthood, a life that is conducted in a cinematic set that simulates a town, populated by dozens of actors and extras, and many hidden cameras that follow and record his every move. While the film seeks to challenge its viewers with questions of ethics and morality, in Shilon's TV series the ethical codes are abandoned entirely. Over the course of three and a half weeks, Frankel, who is convinced that he is playing a leading role in the Israeli telenovela Love around the Corner, is tricked by the television crew and actors on air, becoming the subject of a vulgar prank. In the installation, a face was stretched and distorted almost unrecognizably. The concrete stretching of the face print on the floor is a perfect metaphor for Shilon's hoax, as the Hebrew word for hoax (metiha) also denotes an act of stretching. The facial distortion recalls the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein the Younger's painting, The Ambassadors (1533), which at first glance seems to be a portrayal of an elliptical plate, and only on closer look and from a very specific angle, the skull is revealed, encrypted, as it were, within the painting, symbolizing life's transience (memento mori, "remember you must die"). Microphone stands are placed on the surface of the flat, distorted image, stretched across the floor of the space, holding cigars whose smoking was cut short, echoing Shilon's trademark. The cigar ash falls on Frankel's face, intensifying, alongside the act of trampling, the sense of humiliation and insult.
︎︎︎ Video documentation
