Catalogue > At random

The first part of Nude Descending a Staircase is a composition of clips found online that were made by visitors—pilgrims—to the remote memorial site of Walter Benjamin in Portbou, Spain. Each of these individual registrations is anchored in the specificity of the location. They start with the arrival to Portbou, go through the small town up to the cemetery, and end in a dramatic descent down Dani Karavan’s iconic staircase, which was created as an homage to Walter Benjamin. The assembly this audiovisual material transforms the autonomous experiences into one collective trajectory, and entangles collective memory, experience and the production of images. The second part reveals another staircase, abandoned and barricaded, on a small stage-like platform, outside the former Espai Memorial Walter Benjamin. The second staircase modestly suggests an alternative mode of framing memory. The title, borrowed from Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 painting, proposes to dialogue Walter Benjamin’s writing on history and reproduction with Duchamp’s attempt—in relation to the developments in photography—to capture movement autonomous from a body. Nude Descending a Staircase is the first chapter in a series of works titled Gathering Series.

Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat (both °1983 in Tel Aviv) have been working in collaboration for several years and are creating works in the Audiovisual field. Living and working in Brussels. Their works have been shown in film festivals as IDFA and Rotterdam Film Festival (NL); Courtisane (BE); New Horizons (PL); on ARTE/WDR; exhibited in solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (CH) and Argos (BE), and group exhibitions in STUK (BE); EMAF (DE) and The Petah-Tikva Museum for Contemporary Arts (IL). Their works have been produced by Auguste Orts and Argos (BE) and distributed by EYE institute (NL), they have won prizes in IMAGES (CA) and Oberhausen Film Festival (DE). Sirah and Eitan have presented their work as featured artists at the 59th Flaherty Film Seminar (US), and have participated in artists talks and presentations in institutions such as FLACC, Genk, LUCA BFA class, Brussels, L`erg BFA class, Brussels, DocNomads 2014, and Bezalel MFA class, Tel Aviv. Sirah and Eitan`s practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading of images – moving or still; the relations between spectatorship and history; and the temporality of narratives and memory. Sirah and Eitan are members of the artists-run collective Messidor