Day Done, 2007
Video, 17:15 min
The work shows a static view of a dilapidated house in south Tel Aviv. A person appears with a paint roller and begins painting in a radial way, a black mark around the window-frame. This gradual blackening — like a sundial — is a performative 'painting' act and stands in opposition to the traditional artistic view of landscape painting and its usual existence on an internal wall, inside a 'home'. My black mark on the house, on its external shabby surface indicates there is something wrong with this home, and place and with its representation all in one — a hole, a wound, and a void in memory.
When my black circle is complete, a man with another extended paint roller appears, in the now lit window, and starts painting over my black circle with similar radial strokes, but he is using white paint. It was an old tradition in newly built Jewish houses in the Diaspora, to leave an eastern wall unfinished, bare, and without paint — in memory of the "Churban" — the destruction of the Jerusalem temple — and also the fleeing from home [land] into exile. So painting an unfinished surface of an exterior wall in Tel Aviv is a 'black mirror' to this tradition of remembering and yearning.
