The Nightingale is delighted to present Orr Menirom and a solo screening of her digital video art. Surveying work from the past eight years, this screening follows Menriom’s development from a sculpture background into a concrete exploration of the materiality of the video medium. Broadly, Menirom’s work investigates how contemporary digital technologies complicate indexical representation of reality and human perception. In making work that plays on the edges of the technical and conceptual properties of digital video, Menirom engages narrative expectation and the murkiness of memory by using glitch, off-set editing, and conspicuous digital construction.

“My current video practice focuses on the ephemeral as a tool for the investigation of the social and political condition. Can the act of imagination, underlying the work of art, become a tool for social and political change? My short films move between figuration and abstraction, investigating what is real and what is barely or beyond perceptible. Some of the videos begin as a familiar form, such as a news interview, a political debate or a viral YouTube video. As the work progresses, the form slowly disintegrates into an abstract space, inhabited by glitched images and anonymous voices. Another area of interest in my work is the complex relations between video art and film. I re-edit materials from film, television and social media in order to investigate the mechanisms by which they construct meaning. Influenced by the video essay genre, I question the narrating voice often used in video essays and cinema in general, and try to find texts within the footage itself. I re-edit speeches, dub images and use others’ words to create new sentences. The editing is transparent, and the editor’s hand is felt through jump-cuts and glitches. This brings to the surface the power dynamic between the viewer and the author: Whose voice speaks in the video? Whose message is heard?”- OM

Orr Menirom was born in Tel Aviv and received an BFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2010 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014. Her work has been presented internationally at festivals and galleries including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Fafa Gallery in Helsinki, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Chicago Underground Film Festival and Aspect/Ratio Gallery in Chicago.

Program Details:
The Vanishing Monuments (2009, 5:42)
Index (Untitled Symmetry) (2017, 0:39)

Sunset and a Tower (2010, 4:50)

Index (Untitled Gatekeeper) (2017, 1:11)

Limited Speech Holds Endless Misunderstandings (2013, 10:00)

Index (Untitled Exit) (2017, 0:37)

Exchange (2014, 12:03)

Index (Untitled Modern Savage) (2017, 2:10)

Clinton and Sanders Looking at the World and Naming Things for the First Time (2017, 11:23)

Index (Untitled Baudrillard) (2017, 1:12)

Homewrecker (2016, 14:32)

TRT 64:31

Programmed by Christy LeMaster

$7-10

Official Website

More events on this date

Tags: Chicago, Christy LeMaster, Orr Menirom, The Nightingale, This Structure Exists in Real Life, West Town