Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat

Sirah and Eitan have been working in collaboration for several years and are creating works in the Audiovisual field. They live and work in Brussels. Their practice focuses on the performative aspects of the moving image. In their work they aim to mark the spatial and durational potentialities of reading of images – moving or still; the relations between spectatorship and history; the temporality of narratives and memory and the material surfaces of image production.

Their works have been shown in duo exhibitions in Kunsthalle Basel (CH); Argos, Brussels (BE) and CAC Delme (FR); at group exhibitions in Argos (BE); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg (DE); Portikus, Frankfurt (DE); Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR) and STUK, Leuven (BE). And in film festivals such as EMAF, Osnabrück (DE); Atonal, Berlin (DE); Doc Lisboa (PT); Oberhausen Film Festival (DE); Rotterdam Film Festival (NL); Les Rencontres International, Paris and Berlin (FR/DE); New Horizons, Wrocław (PL); Images, Toronto (CA); 25FPS, Zagreb (HR). Sirah and Eitan are currently teaching at ERG, Brussels.

We come to MORPHO with the desire to go into an inter-generational dialogue with Chantal Akerman, traveling back and forth between the Negev/al Naqab desert in Israel/Palestine and Brussels. We’re looking from Brussels, at the history of displacement in Israel/Palestine, through the lens of Chantal Akerman – the daughter of a Polish holocaust survivor. It involves opening the baggage we bring with us from Israel to Brussels – as children of the Zionist colonial project – in order to practice decolonisation in the deepest conceptual manner. What does Anti-Zionism mean in the Belgian political landscape today. How does Jewish, “Post-Israeli” identity fit in this environment? And how does our personal and political position reflect back to the environment we work in? To our “artistic practice”. Can these be untwined? The project tries to define notions of home and belonging through the prism of time, displacement and accountability.