Anna Greenband:
Beyond

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The exhibition includes sound, video, and photography works, entwined to create one installation, a multi-sensorial world that the viewer immerses herself in.

The central work describes a drive down Route 3199, a road connecting Arad and the ruins of Masada and overlooking the Dead Sea. It takes place at dusk, so the car crosses the road as day changes into night. The drive is deceptive regarding the states of consciousness it alludes to – sometimes, it seems like a real drive: you can sense the mounds of gravel under the vehicle's wheels, and the destination can be deciphered as the skyline of Arad. At other times, it becomes a dream journey, the road turns misty and darkens, and the city becomes abstract, shimmering points of light. Just before the entrance into the town, the car turns around and goes back in the opposite direction, on Route 3199, which becomes a cul-de-sac, a dead-end.

The drive branches out through the exhibition into other works: in one video work, the artist's eyes are reflected in the front mirror during the drive. Is she the driver or the passenger? Is she in control of the ride or someone else is? The sounds of the ride are audible: the noises of the vehicle and the road and the human body inside the car – breathing, moving, touching. Distant voices are heard, comprising several sound tracks sprinkled throughout the space. Greenband describes the organizing structure of the exhibition as a series of gazes-images, mise-en-scènes that contain one another and are contained within each other. The sensory experience is broken down into playful, animated layers, which "realize and shake up the final image simultaneously." 

In one area of the exhibition, the artist has built (in collaboration with her life and art partner, Igor Tsinovoi) a radio with five channels, each broadcasting a song she had recorded over the last few years – a Tibetan prayer to demons, a Bedouin song about a wolf, an arrangement of the Hasidic version of a Passover song, and more. The viewer is invited to sit in the driver's seat and select a channel, and in this way, affect the exhibition's changing soundscape.

The term "beyond" in the title describes the experience of driving on Route 3199, which, for the artist, is close to the experience defined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto as the Numinous. In his 1917 book, Otto describes the religious experience of holiness as containing horror, wonder, and exhilaration, an encounter with complete otherness beyond the senses. Greenband aims at this realm when she reconstructs and replicates the nocturnal journey. As in earlier works, she approaches the mystical, mysterious experience, insisting on deconstructing and replicating it – bringing it closer - for herself and the viewer through sensory means, which are influenced by theatrical and cinematic tropes.

Greenband recorded the Tibetan song in one of the sound works in 2019 when she visited India. Only after recording it she realized that it was a prayer asking the demons to take away the ego, as part of a Buddhist practice called Chöd (to cut, to disengage from the ego), that guides practitioners to imagine cutting their body into pieces and offering them to demons and enemies – those internal demons immersed in the ego. Following Indian metaphysics, Greenband quotes the Hindu spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi, who defines her approach to photography and video: "as we project the world of dreams at night, the world we see in front of us is only a projection of us, the watchers."

Vis-a-vis the multiple levels of images and sounds in the exhibition, the viewers must abandon their passive and also appropriative position. In this sense, Greenband's exhibition may be closer to ethical perceptions of holiness, like that of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, who has insisted that the Other would not be swallowed into the self or the same, that its Otherness should be preserved. For Levinas, the presence of the Other undermines the independence of the self since, to respond to the Other, a person must come out of him/herself. It is an ethical connection, a responsibility, realized in the face of the Other who is looking at me: " [S]ince the Other looks at me, I am responsible for him, without even having taken on responsibilities in his regard; his responsibility is incumbent on me [...] The tie with the Other is knotted only as responsibility; moreover, whether accepted or refused, whether knowing or not knowing how to assume it, whether able or unable to do something concrete for the Other. To say: here I am [me voici]. To do something for the Other. To give. To be a human spirit [...] Responsibility is what is incumbent on me exclusively, and what, humanly, I cannot refuse." And let us not forget, the artist's eyes follow us throughout the exhibition.

 

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