Single-channel Video, 2’50’’

 

A short ironic narrative on language and meaning.  The video was produced during the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon.  Numbed by the absurdity of the war, and in residing in the US at that time, I obsessively wrote and re-wrote the phrase ‘remind me to remember to forget’ until I metamorphosed it into a video.  In a split screen format, the video depicts two separate but synchronized performances.  Rhythmically set to the sound of stifled breathing, the video questions an innate constructed memory ‘made-to-forget’.  A ‘memory’ somehow created to be raped, disposed of, and eradicated right before its transition from present to past.  

 

The phrase ‘remind me to remember to forget’ thus becomes a play on the meaning of no-meaning.  The phrase is also an archetypical mode of societal survival in a social structure built on the maintenance of power/hierarchy relations, often mechanizing precisely the absurd to further these very power relations. The video erupted a chain of successive works that looked to falsify the language/wording of memory and our understanding of it.