Tirtza Even
she/her
Tirtza Even | Photo courtesy of the artist
Throughout her practice, Tirtza Even has produced video works ranging from experimental feature-length documentaries to multichannel, immersive and interactive installations. In them she depicts her encounters with individuals whose lives embody complex, at times extreme, social and political dynamics in specific locations (e.g. Palestine, Turkey, the US and Germany). Through almost imperceptible digital manipulation of extended moments and by means of polyphonic, nonlinear display, she aims to express the transience, diversity and partiality of points of view.
Natural Life, developed in 2013 during her initial residency with High Concept Labs, was an early implementation of this path and manifested as a multichannel installation, a single-channel film, and interactive archive.
While the format of her work consistently employs audio-visual forms of documentation, the lived experiences explored in her projects are vast: She has observantly explored topics including incarceration, motherhood and womanhood, intimacy, immigration, and most recently, climate change.
2025 HCL Fellowship Project
Disturbed (2025, work in progress)
Stills from the Louisiana section of Disturbed.
Disturbed, a series of multichannel installation, examines, through digital disruptions and a polyphony of testimonies, the emotional impact of climate change on our lives.
Disturbed's 1st part takes place in New Mexico, the 2nd in Louisiana, and the 3rd in Alaska.
Focusing on the role of water in transforming each site—its lack (NM desert), excess (LA floods) and thawing (AK)—Disturbed explores the intersection of the pending change with class, industry pollution and racial segregation, and consequently, its varied effect on the local residents' emotional lives.
“My goal is to invoke this diversity of responses, and use digital interruptions to render the overlap between the scientific actuality of climate change and the individual perception of its threat.”
Each of the image-sets is projected on a cluster of 2-3 wide screens.
Overtime, a subtle disturbance cuts through the sequence and between the clustered screens.
The animated disturbance is responsive to details within each scene (e.g. architectural lines) and to the landscape depicted (desert/swamp/glacier), and resembles splintering, mold formation, swelling: modes of destruction that affect the images themselves rather than their referents.
Accompanying the images is a polyphony of the residents' accounts of the emotional impact of drought, flood or melting ice on their lives. The speakers' background, age, color and gender varies. The Louisiana set includes, for instance, an old woman from a village built by freed slaves; a Mardi Gras Indian chief; a young couple escaping the California fires. Thus, concurrent, acute variations of experiences, conditions and views are exposed within the overarching narrative of climate change.
Disturbed, installation view at SAIC Galleries, SAIC Faculty Sabbatical Triannial (2025)
“I believe the time is ripe to tell the stories of these individuals in fresh ways, by expressing their voices as plural and distinct through expanded technologies such as multichannel and immersive installation; by unfolding the stories nonlinearly and in space; by providing intimate—and thus impactful—access points to a general narrative, through multiple, contradictory angles; by requiring the viewers themselves to create patterns interlinking the fragmented stories/views, and by employing digital effects that interrupt the real and make it internal, interpreted, imagined.”
2013 HCL Residency Project
Natural Life (2014-2015)
Natural Life, an experimental documentary installation produced in conjunction with the legal efforts of The Law Offices of Deborah LaBelle (LODL), challenges inequities in the juvenile justice system by depicting the stories of five youth who received the most severe sentence available for convicted adults--being sentenced to die in prison (i.e. given a sentence of "natural life" or "life without parole"). These stories are presented against the overlapping contexts of social bias, neglect, apprehension and alienation.
Natural Life extracted five individual inmates’ stories from the database of written interviews conducted by LODL. These stories, freshly recorded, interwoven and told from multiple angles, form an array of voices varying in age, gender, economic background and race. The project presents a loosely structured web of diverse views related to each of the stories. For instance, the voice of a victim’s sister who has, over time, formed an intense bond with the killers of her brother, is contrasted with comments by police agents or frustrated family members.
The interviews were coupled with staged and documented scenes from court and from the main characters’ childhood and life in prison.
By injecting fiction (hypothesis) into the documentary format, Tirtza Even proposes alternative interpretations of the documented facts, and questions the public version of the crime as well as its inevitability. The project thus attempts to transgress and complicate the tension between guilt and innocence, accident and intent, as well as the gap between acting and manifesting, projected and recalled worlds.
About the Artist
Tirtza Even is an experimental documentary maker with over 25 years producing single-channel, multichannel and interactive video work.
Her work has shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, including Doc Fortnight (Moma), RIDM (Montreal), Rotterdam Film Festival and NY Video Festival (Lincoln Center); and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), and Harvard University's Carpenter Center, among others). She has won numerous grants and awards including Artadia, Chicago; Fledgling Distribution Fund; Jerome Foundation's Media Arts; 3Arts Visual Arts and Next Level Awards; Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship; Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship; and multiple NYSCA and DCASE Individual Artists Grants. Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise (France) and Video Data Bank (U.S.). Tirtza Even is currently a professor at SAIC.
For more information, visit https://tirtzaeven.info/.
