BoysCraft

Ohad Meromi

The video work Weaving was shot in Manhattan, yet it includes "authentic" and "local" Middle Eastern details. The video is a takeoff on an educational film that conveys an ideological message through visual means. Employing a carefully arranged editing syntax, Meromi employs a series of manipulations that are meant to be read as "authentic" details (the Mediterranean floor fan; the typical Israeli landscape; the loom, constructed according to the model of a "Maskit" loom from the 1960s; and the soundtrack, taken from an internet site that broadcasts Iranian music from California). The process of weaving itself signifies the authenticity of a new Zionist-Israeli identity. Invented during the 1950s and 1960s, this identity was forged out of various ethnic traditions, synthesized with a touch of International Design ("Yemenite authenticity tied together with modernist chic," according to the artist). Meromi's postcolonialist approach is anchored in a critique of modernism's failures - which, according to him, stem from the complex affinities between folklore, primitivism and futuristic utopianism.

Born on Kibbutz Mizra, 1967; lives and works in New York