Artist:  Eitan Vitkon (born in 1967), photographer and videographer
Curator:  Meirav Oz

From a letter to the state following the Second Lebanon War:
“It’s just between you and me.  Today I’m able to say things I once couldn’t.   In my work, as in my own life, I’m at a breaking point, a fracture in time, which could be simultaneously the fading of a dawn or a new beginning. Despite my fundamental optimism, I’m on the verge of crying out in despair.  A cry of pain, of humiliation and of fear…”

The slender thread that connects us, citizens of the state of Israel, to this letter is the feeling that nothing has happening here as we hoped.  We all face a blank page, unable to write even a single word.  Eitan Vitkon’s letter only makes more obvious the letter we, as citizens, haven’t written.  It expresses unrequited love for the country which once possessed an innocent vision but has instead turned into a place where money equals power, a place ruled by the gutter.

There are almost no people in Eitan’s work – they have no presence, they focus only on themselves, drunk with their own personal business. They have no interest in the common good.  They are the ones who walk in darkness.

The video looks at the state/country as a focus for feelings of helplessness, pain and humiliation shattering into thousands of fragments.  Here the personal confronts the national, cries out in the face of the symbol.

What do we feel?  What do we expect?  What would we have happen here?  We recognize a split personality – profound pain at the fractured land and anger at what controls it, for which we ourselves are responsible:  we feel helpless, that we’re coming apart, fragmenting into amorphousness.

We’ve lost the right to ignore our freedom, we must now shout our truth.We waver between our compassion for the country with all it implies and our desire to shake everything up, to challenge every complacency.

Will we be able to doubt the new values that have appeared, those undermining the lovely principles on which we were raised and be able to rebuild our solidarity?Does the distorted star that no longer retains its original shape symbolize our lost path? Our ability to withstand chaos, what’s happening below the surface – even though we make no changes – depends on the power of observation, of sobering up, of awakening.

There, among the Jerusalem hills, with the spirit of the wind and the light, facing black earth that brought pain, we try to understand how our hearts might dawn with a new beginning.

שקיעה או זריחה? איתן ויתקון / Dawnfall or Sunrise? Eitan Vitkon

שקיעה או זריחה? איתן ויתקון / Dawnfall or Sunrise? Eitan Vitkon

שקיעה או זריחה? איתן ויתקון / Dawnfall or Sunrise? Eitan Vitkon