Tamir Zadok

The Gaza Canal video work raises thoughts about image and reality, while at the same time reflecting on the conscious and unconscious. It turns our gaze to collective cravings and visions regarding what happens “beyond the canal” (through the looking-glass), and it also, and mainly, inquires about the repressed and silenced. Calling upon the viewers to join the “quest for building the Gaza Canal”, the video unfolds an auto-utopian vision of appropriation and takeover, of collective longings and a delusory Gaza Island. At the same time, it also reveals a hidden yearning for the eradication of Gaza.
In 1977, artist Moshe Gershoni wrote these words on a piece of paper stained in red and orange: “The problem of painting is the Palestinian problem”. Zadok’s sarcastic work speaks of us by appropriating and ridiculing the pathos, design, visuals and sounds of newsflashes and documentaries, and creating a fake knowledge base. It describes the Israeli problem as the successor of the Zionist project, and as inextricably tied, as blood-related to the Palestinian problem.
What appears to be a propaganda film is revealed as a complex and multilayered stratagem, which, by declaring the preposterous reasonable and the inconceivable obvious, it presents a dystopian reality as the very realization of a utopian vision. In doing so, the film not only sheds light on the collective autosuggestion informing the Gaza Island, but also the width of the canal, the depth of the gaping void, and the hollowness of magic solution. Gaza Canal leads to reflections on narrative construction and control mechanisms, forcing us to return our gaze to the Palestinian problem post-October 7, as one that can no longer be denied.