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.
The Fellowship Project
Disturbed is a multi-part multichannel installation that depicts, through subtle digital disruptions and a layered polyphony of testimonies, the emotional impact that the changing climate has had on individual lives.
The initial section of the project was recorded in New Mexico in the winter of 2023. A second section takes place in Louisiana and was filmed in the fall of 2023. The third section will be filmed in Alaska in the summer of 2025. Each segment is designed to convey the impact, emotional and physical, that climate-change has had on the residents of the specific location focused on. Each set of scenes constitutes a stand-alone multichannel installation. Ultimately, an anticipated five to seven installations will be displayed simultaneously.
Chronicle of a Fall, a collaboration with Nadav Assor, 2021
The scenes seem almost static. Over time, however, a disturbance is detected that cuts across the shifting images and between the screens. The effect of the disturbance, a slow interruption of the sequence, stems from the nature of each landscape (e.g. swamp, desert, glacier), and resembles mold-formation, thawing, withering: various modes of destruction which affect the images themselves rather than their referents.
Laid over each visual sequence are edited fragments from interviews with residents of each location, who describe the personal impact of drought, flood, smoke-pollution, melting ice etc. The voices are orchestrated to form a complex polyphony of testimonies about the various and distinct emotional meanings of climate-change.
The Initial Project
Summer 2013
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/.
