Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

The Palace was once a grandiose hotel built by the Mufti of Jerusalem in 1929. Long abandoned, the building has recently been bought by Waldorf Astoria and entirely gutted so as to preserve only its historical façade. "Palace, 2013" is a collaboration with the workers on the construction site of Waldorf Astoria Jerusalem and presents a series of three atmospheric tableaux inspired by the formal qualities of the site and its history. By means of simple props and actions, the order of the site and its daily labour routine are temporarily disrupted, allowing for a multiplicity of resonances to occur. Adler de Oliveira thus acts as an observer of the broad range of possibilities embedded within the site: its current reality as a dismantled building on the one hand; and its latent future on the other. The hotel in its present form - a site in the making - presents an anomalous reality, since it functions as a temporary home for its construction workers. The site imbues the power relationships characteristic of Israeli society, contrasted against its designed purpose: to offer its visitors an escape from local reality; a total disconnection from time and place.

Samantha Adler de Oliveira was born in Paris in 1985 and grew up in Brussels. In 2003 she completed a BA in European Studies at King`s College London. She then went on to earn a Fine Art degree from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, during which time she spent a semester at the School of Visual Arts in New York. In 2011 she participated in the European Exchange Academy and is a recent graduate of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She received a special mention at the Mediatine Award for emerging artists in Belgium (2011) and the Aileen Cooper Prize for outstanding graduate show (2012). Her work has been shown in Israel, Belgium, Germany and New York. She had her first one-person exhibition in 2013 at the Architect House in Tel-Aviv Yaffo.