Kept Alive (which refers to the text engraved upon headstones to reserve pre-purchased burial spots) is a three-channel video and photo installation focused on Jerusalem's "Mountain of Rest". The installation's documentary approach is employed to address the enormous cemetery's three primary activities: construction, burial, and visitation.
Filming on location for a full year, Pereg investigates intersections between the living and the dead on the “Mountain of Rest”. The cemetery is one of Israel's largest, founded in 1953 as an alternative to the historic "Mount Olive" cemetery and spreading over 580,000 square meters. Burial grounds are precious and expensive, due to geographic location and general lack of space.
Despite the site's intense density, with just over 10 inches between graves, it is still possible to purchase and reserve plots. A selection of photographs document numerous markers placed on the empty, reserved graves, presented as "portraits" of their purchaser. Each stands for a living individual offering the means to occupy territory in the land of the dead. In Israel, a country that has centered around death, memory, and land division from its inception, this phenomenon of peripheral real-estate is existentially political. The vast demand for burial space has, in recent years, given rise to major construction and expansion plans as means of offering more plots. Plans for expanded portions include the creation of plots in the floors and walls of skeletal buildings, new spatial conceptions of space that will no doubt create an entirely separate visual identity. Pereg follows the construction of a six storey, 6,000-grave building, juxtaposing construction scenes with memorial services and visitations. Kept Alive depicts the "Mountain of Rest" clearly divided into workers and visitors, silence and noise, movement and stillness, Arabs and Jews. The installation prolongs our look at this mundane and unique location and its activity, honing in on that which we avoid. Averting our attention from who is to occupy the grave, Kept Alive focuses on its size, depth, distance from its neighbors, and those who are constructing it.
The multi-channel video installation reconstructs the mountain as an enigmatic microcosm, creating a fabricated space in which all the cemetery's conflicting processes occur simultaneously. The work's sound is also artificially constructed, sampled from various sources and pieced together in a studio. Through the almost-real, Pereg re-choreographs the "Mount of Rest", isolating gestures and movements, giving them new roles.
As with previous work, Pereg's investigation of a specific location and the interactions it hosts serves an investigation of larger human polemics. Her work in Jerusalem for the past two years has focused on ways that space is marked and divided. Alternating between close-ups and long shots, pans and still camera, speech and action, Kept Alive provides a range of perspectives on how the living cohabitate with the dead, on a specific mountain, on that specific land.Pereg work is typically documentary based, transforming reality into tightly controlled, quasi-theatrical events. Her projects focus on the intersections of social structures with the authority of the individual. She seeks out unique and personal perspectives, wherein personal visions might be politicized, aestheticized and stripped down to reveal socially potent fragments. Pereg's process begins with periods of intense travel and close observation and "re-looking".
Nira Pereg holds degrees from New York’s Cooper Union and Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy and splits her time between teaching and creating video-works that have been exhibited at P.S. 1, the Israeli Museum, the Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Germany’s ZKM, and the Tate Modern.
Read more about this exhibition at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery website.
Image: Nira Pereg's "Mount of Rest" (September 2008)
