LA><ART

Located ten miles north of Jerusalem, Rawabi is the first planned city in Palestine. For his solo exhibition at LA><ART, Nir Evron presents Endurance, a film work composed of gray scale rectangles representing the doors, windows, and furniture reduced from the architectural plans of Rawabi. Every shot in Endurance represents the length of one wall based on a formula transposed into filmic time. In this abstraction of Rawabi homes one meter equals 5.4 seconds (shot in 16mm at 24 frames per second). The duration of the film calculated down to the millisecond corresponds to the total enclosure of a family’s living quarters in the matrix of infrastructure and superstructure. In this finale to Evron’s architectural trilogy (Oriental Arch 2009 followed by a Free Moment in 2011) Endurance aligns a blue print to the rectangular footprint of 16mm film by scanning, digitizing, transferring and finally projecting the interiors of Rawabi within the cube of the gallery.

Endurance takes the fundaments of apartments to create an indexical series, advanced as montage. In the artist’s words Endurance is more than moving image; it is “a mechanism to translate space into time and vice versa.” Each blank capsule on the screen presents an everyday environment and a utopian geometry consistent with early avant-garde film and reductive modernist designs. By listing the total running time of the projection as 19373 frames the artist evokes structuralist film composed not of scenes, but single frames advanced in succession. In this formal exercise we are asked to ponder increments of the first planned city in Palestine, displaced in succession along a strip of film.

Nir Evron is an artist and filmmaker based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He has shown extensively in biennales, festivals, galleries and museums, including the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), The Israel Museum (2014), The International Center for Photography Triennial, New York (2013), The Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris (2012), The Tel Aviv Center for Contemporary Art (2011) and the 6th Berlin Biennale (2010). In 2015 the artist will present a solo exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Evron is represented by Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv.

Nir Evron and Orit Raff's programs were made possible with the generous support of The Artis Grant Program; The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation; Consulate General of Israel; Michael Hittleman Trust.