Nir Evron | A Free Moment

A Free Moment explores the remains of Tell el-Ful, an unfinished building in northeast Jerusalem intended to serve as a summer palace for the Jordanian royal family. The building’s construction, which started in 1966, was halted the following year by the Six-Day War. It was never completed, and its early structure, now located in Israeli territory, was never removed. Evron examined this modern ruin by placing a 35mm cinema camera on a robotic arm attached to a track, and programming the apparatus to complete three simultaneous actions: Dolly (the camera moves in a straight line on a track), Pan (the camera moves in a 360-degree horizontal revolution), and Tilt (the camera moves in a 360-degree vertical revolution). While each individual type of camera motion is a common practice, layering all three at once is unusual and produces remarkably unfamiliar results. This piece is ideally shown as a large-scale projection to maximize the unstable sensations created in viewers’ bodies by the complex movement of the camera. The four-minute running time of the piece corresponds with the length of a single film reel. Like Oriental Arch, A Free Moment is in keeping with Evron’s explorations of how architecture can serve as “conductor of historical memory and a signifier of the possibility of a future, a possibility which is often revealed as a failure.”

A Free Moment, 2011, 4 min

Nir Evron (b. 1974, Tel Aviv) is known for his provocative meditations on the construction of political and social histories. He works across photography, video, and film, and examines specific artifacts such as derelict monuments, historic buildings, found photographs, and borrowed biographies. Evron’s works are often reflexive hybrids, combining historical documents with medial inquiries, bringing forward the structures that shape history and the media used for its representation. Evron has exhibited extensively in museums, festivals, biennales, and galleries in Israel and abroad. He presented in solo exhibitions at The Jewish Museum Berlin (2023)l, The Tel Aviv Museum (2016), ICA Richmond (2015) LAXART, Los Angeles (2014); and the CCA in Tel Aviv (2011), to name a few, and participated in group exhibitions in The Tel Aviv Museum (2023) Kunsthaus Zurich (2019), FOMU, Antwerp (2017); the New Museum, New York (2015); Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2015); the 19th Biennial of Sydney (2014), the ICP triennial, New York (2013), and the 6th Berlin Biennale (2010) among many other venues. Recently, he was awarded Israel’s Minister of Culture Video-Art award and the Miron Sima Arts Award. Evron holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, and an MFA from The Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 2015, Evron was a visiting professor at the VCU Department of Photography and Film in Richmond, VA.

Supported by: the Israeli Fund for Video Art and Experimental Cinema, the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), Tel Aviv | Thanks to: Adi Englman, Omer Krieger, Avi Mograbi, Ben Hagari, Sergio Edelsztein, Diana Shoef, Yoram Hirsh, Miki Kratsman, Ran Rabinovich