Collaboration Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus - Performance Installation 2016 - ZAZ Festival – an international festival for performance-art Performance Art Platform (Miklat 209), Tel Aviv, Israel, 08. – 17.12.2016

In “Clear Decision”, Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus are separated by a wooden wall placed at the center of the space. The wall, mounted on wheels, allows movement through the room. The audience can view the artists from both sides, seeing two bodies—one on the right, one on the left—divided by a solid barrier. This wall is difficult to penetrate, yet both artists begin to saw through it with a long, double-handled cutting blade. From opposite sides, each artist holds one end of the blade, straining to move it through the wooden wall. As they work, the wall shifts around the room, changing positions. The artists’ bodies stretch, bend, and lie on the floor in order to reach and cut the panel. Over time, a cut forms in the center until the wall finally splits in two. In the end, two separate wooden panels remain, and the artists pause to reflect on the action they’ve just completed. The wall functions as a powerful symbol: it represents separation—between cultures, religions, bodies, languages, and nations. It speaks to the re-emergence of physical and ideological barriers in today’s world. While the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, new walls are rising—between North and South Korea, the USA and Mexico, Europe and Africa, Israel and Palestine. Beyond political divisions, Ekici and Shahar’s work ruptures the once seamless fundaments that shaped their very existence. Coming from an Islamic and Jewish background respectively, their performance is achieved through a strenuous dialogic process behind the scenes. They work and argue; they negotiation their cultures, identities, and bodies in favor of cohesion and a new kind of syncretic relation that shatters the disparity cast upon them by ‘walls’ or distance. What happens in the physical performance itself is the actualization of these tactics of commonality—their struggle to break-down the barrier is characterized first and foremost by their fight to witness and present each other’s full humanity, entangled as it may be, in seemingly insurmountable dissimilitude. The performance makes visible this global tendency toward division, and the effort required to breach it. (Text Edited: Jono Wang Chu)

Wooden plate, wheels under the wooden plate, big hand saw, several spotlights

45 min

Photo: Alejandra Herrera Silva; Camera by ZAZ Festival Tel Aviv