Haggadah
Description
Haggadah Statement
Haggadah deals with a number of issues but is linked by a theme that centers on the reconstruction of familial/historical remembrance. The challenge of my work and in using digital media is to find how the fragmented nature of memory - both subjective and impressionable - can be represented through digital media. Or as Geoffrey Hartman states "Can memory retrieval and its communitarian aspect withstand the "imperturbable camera," its cold, objectifying focus, and now, in addition, the impersonal, market driven forces of electronic recall and dissemination?"
As in my earlier work, Haggadah grapples with media saturation and its subsequent devaluation of information specifically as it pertains to familial and cultural memory; how the fragmented nature of memory×both subjective and impressionable--can be represented through digital media, the event that triggered it, the history it becomes?; is it the 'truth' and if so who's?
The film compels the viewer to reflect upon the minute isolated occurrences of which history in, the observed sense is composed. This is done through the filming of a Passover Seder at my family's home while being informed of the experiences of its members during the Holocaust. By carefully extracting reassembling bits of sampled film, television and sound bytes the film tries to create the sociological and cultural impasse that is created though media between my families history and my own experience. Rather than disguise or remove disruptions, I try to deliberately monopolize on the artifacts of sampling media into the piece. The narrative, that traditionally stream towards the viewer in an undifferentiated flow is interrupted and seized upon to communicate what is perhaps a new understanding of an old story.
My artistic interest is not directly historical; rather, it follows a more visual thread, tracing visual media, random images and misinterpreted accounts revealing the presence of an absence that many of us share. Familial memory is an inheritance that I continue to question, explore, interpret and try to give a place within our time and with new visual media.