The cinematic work of Yair Garbuz, one of the first Israeli artists to engage with projected images, is characterized by a multiplicity of identities, cultures and discourses. Garbuz deconstructs ad reassembles relationships and identities, while examining the points of intersection between artist, artwork and audience. Through the use of diverse strategies, such as the use of multiple voices and personas, he undermines the mechanisms that define the Israeli collective. By presenting himself as the "other" and combining personal, biographical details with images pertaining to the country's social, political and artistic history, Garbuz ironically examines various myths, slogans and clichés related to local existence, as well as the context in which Israeli art has evolved.

This exhibition features six films and video works created by Garbuz between 1974 and 1986, and displayed on 17 screens. Some of these films are presented in their entirety, while in other cases only selected excerpts are shown. Rather than screening each film in a linear manner, different segments of the same film are presented simultaneously on different screens one alongside another. The exhibition space is thus transformed into a site of multiple performances, personas and speakers, underscoring the experience of multiplicity and the flood of images that characterize Garbuz's works.

In addition to the films, the exhibition contains several cutouts that were included in the 1979 exhibition: "If Not a Selfish Giant, Then At Least in His Garden" (the figures of a boy, a girl, a pioneer, a Yemenite porter, an Arab man and others), which tell Israel's national story. In the current exhibition, the silent cutouts surround the monitor on which Garbuz tells the story of the giant in his garden.

The figure of the artist created by Garbuz is characterized by multiple personas and voices, and presents the self as a kind of fictional entity that is formed and subsequently disassembled in a process at once comic, absurd, and tragic. Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction' madness and reason, he gives expression to the crises that have marked his perception of two great myths: the myth of modernism and the myth of Zionism.

This exhibition highlights the layered experiential ensemble that Garbuz creates in his work through action, speech and singing. At once ironic and nostalgic Garbuz points to the crisis experience by the Israeli collective. He demythifies and domesticates the "tribal fire," while simultaneously commemorating it.

A Painter, For Instance an Arab, 1978

Super 8 film and slide show, 23:18 minutes, soundtrack

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

In this work, Garbuz points to the existence of a complex reality by bringing together two different continuums: a slide show composed of a wide range of local images is displayed on one monitor, while the second monitor features a film interspersed with newsreels screened at local cinemas during the 1960s.

This work gives expression to the changes in Israel's audio-visual culture following the introduction of television, and points to the role of news programs in shaping national consciousness.  It also relates directly to the effect of the Yom Kippur War on the Israeli national narrative.

If Not a Selfish Giant , Then at Least in His Garden, 1978

90:00 minutes

Super 8 film, unsynchronized soundtrack

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

Cutouts from the exhibition "If Not a Selfish Giant, Then at Least in His Garden," 1979

Courtesy of the artist

This film presents a series of paraphrases on Oscar Wilde's story "The Selfish Giant," which is told by Garbuz as an allegory of the Zionist dream and its dissolution. The monitors are surrounded by cutouts of various figures, which Garbuz purchased from a collection of objects displayed in the late 1960s in the exhibition "Israel Is You." These figures originally served to illustrate the canonical story of the foundation of the state, and the related melting-pot ideology. Garbuz undermines these original meanings by playing with the figures in the garden, and engaging with them in a ridiculous and absurd manner.

In this work, Garbuz expresses a doubtful, ambivalent attitude towards the manner in which Zionist ideals have been realized in Israel. His treatment of these materials encourages in-depth observation, while luring viewers into a trap composed of double messages and constantly changing meanings.

The work is screened on four monitors; one of them features a full-length version of the film, while the other monitors simultaneously feature different excerpts from the same film.

12.7.75, 1975

Super 8 film, three excerpts from a film (90:00 minutes)

Unsynchronized sound

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

The exhibition features three excerpts from the film, which are mainly concerned with series, continuums and processes of classification. In this way, Garbuz examines meaning-producing patterns:

1. "Composition, patch of color, line, form, color... genre, irony, pathos..."' 3:35 minutes.
2. "A picture within a picture... one thing within another within another," 2:23 minutes.
3. "Every time I want to do something I feel it in the form of a painting, I feel it in the form of a photograph or something else, the painting can be transformed into a photograph, a screenplay, a text, etc...," 2:02 minutes.

This work produces three pairs of audio-visual continuums that constrain the viewer to endow them with meaning. Garbuz's voice, which is heard reading the lists, underscores the precedence of language over vision and action. By undermining a series of stable categories, Garbuz examines what defines an artwork, and to what degree it is shaped by the conventions associated with different genres.

Notes, 1974

8 mm film, 20:35 minutes, silent

Unsynchronized sound

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

This film is composed of very short segments, which present a range of different images. The dominance of various types of flat surfaces underscores the flatness of the screen itself. The film was edited to create a succession of rapidly changing images, which point to a lack of hierarchy between different segments. The registration of these rhythmic visual beats on the retina enhances the corporeal dimension of the visual experience, and compels the viewer to pay close attention to the process of seeing.

The Maestro Brothers, 1975

Super 8 film

90:00 minutes, unsynchronized soundtrack

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

This film features various actions, excerpts from television films, and various personas that are played by Garbuz, his female students and his family members. The film is presented in its entirety alongside the following five segments:

1. "Er hot mir von America..." 00:07 minutes. Speaking in Yiddish, Garbuz says: "He sent me a package from America with an overall and modern shoes."
2. "Je suis Modigliani," 0:34 minutes. Garbuz repeats the words uttered by the Modigliani character in the 1958 film "Montparnasse 19," and thus expresses identification with the tragic fate of this painter, who died penniless in Paris.
3. "It was one of those cold northern nights," 1:47 minutes. Garbuz leads a communal singing session.
4. "The kibbutz member and the goldfish," Garbuz describes, in a letter, the problematic of being an artist on a kibbutz.
5. "To see Rococo art on the mountains with Yemenites," 3:13 minutes.

Garbuz creates a realistic drawing, and documents art classes at the Midrash School of Art.

Garbuz tells the story of Israeli art in several voices. He touches upon the forces operating in the art field, the relations between teachers and students, and the formation of artistic schools. He describes the complex relations of Israeli artists with European culture, and the conditions of working on the periphery and in a peripheral language: "For years now we have been waiting for a master of our own to teach us about bohemia and local landscapes..."

Forced to be a Painter, 1986

Video (originally VHS)

2:21 minutes excerpt from a film (180:00 minutes), synchronized soundtrack

Collection of Haifa Museum of Art

Garbuz domesticates a ceremonial fire by transporting it to an ashtray in his living room, and transforming a collective event into a simple, minor, solitary activity. At once ironic and nostalgic, Garbuz points to the crisis experience by the Israeli collective. He demythifies and domesticates the "tribal fire," while simultaneously commemorating it.