Three Works for Piano
October 4–18, 2020
Blood Mountain Projects (Vienna) and Kirberg Motors (Berlin) are pleased to announce the premiere of Dani Gal’s latest work, Three Works for Piano (2020, 4K, colour, 34 mins) at Steirischer Herbst '20 (Graz).
The film examines the roles of silence, silencing and listening in the politics of dominant national narratives and how socially accepted violence is constructed through the disciplines of witness testimonies in historical trauma studies and in post-colonial and post-Holocaust discourses.
The artwork reconstructs three piano performances of the 20th century avant-garde: John Cage’s seminal work 4’33 in the late 1970s, where the intended silence was interrupted by an Israeli audience’s spontaneous performance of a nationalistic song; the radical composer George Antheil’s confrontation of his audience with a loaded gun in a concert in Budapest in 1923; and the first documented art performance of a piano demolition by the Wiener Gruppe in 1959. The three events function as hallucinatory allegories to contemplate the complex dynamics between the historical witness and society.
This triangulation of performer-sound-audience is reflected in a recent real-life event, where the testimony of an Israeli soldier as a violent perpetrator in the occupied territories, was discredited and denied by the state. This negation of culpability sidelines the story from the real victims and exposes the soldier’s moral ambiguity.
Dani Gal’s artistic practice focuses on the production of ideology through the representation of specific historical narratives in a variety of media to question the claims of historical knowledge and to reveal and challenge underlying political preconceptions. Using archival documents towards the creation of cinematic reenactments, sound compositions and other interdisciplinary works, Gal explores the relationship between image, sound and text to illuminate national interests behind the construction of historical-and-national narratives and the process of shaping collective memory. Three Works for Piano continues the artist’s engagement with multi-directional memory and victim-perpetrator relations in post-colonial and post-Holocaust discourses.
The artwork is available by live stream from to October 4–18, 2020 here.
Director: Dani Gal
Camera: Itay Marom
Creative Producer: Caroline Kirberg
Actors: Itay Tiran, Dulcie Smart
Commissioned by:
Steirischer Herbst ’20 (Graz), Kirberg Motors (Berlin) and Blood Mountain Projects (Vienna)
Co-produced by:
Steirischer Herbst ’20 (Graz), Kirberg Motors (Berlin) and Blood Mountain Projects (Vienna)
Supported by:
Artis (New York) and Stiftung Kunstfonds (Bonn)
Dani Gal (1975, Jerusalem) lives and works in Berlin. He studied at Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Stäadelschule in Frankfurt and in Cooper Union in New York. His films and art installations have been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Istanbul Biennale (2011), New Museum New York (2012), Kunsthalle St. Gallen Switzerland (2013), The Jewish Museum New York (2014), Berlinale Forum Expanded (2014), Kunsthaus Zurich (2015) Kunsthalle Wien (2015), Documenta 14 (2017), Centre Pompidou (2018) and at Club TransMediale Festival Berlin (2020). In 2019 he was artist-in-residence at Blood Mountain Projects and research fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute. dani-gal.com
Kirberg Motors is a Berlin-based film production company spearheaded by Caroline Kirberg and specialising in fiction, documentary and experimental film. Working closely with contemporary artists, this is Kirberg’s fourth collaboration with Dani Gal. kirbergmotors.de
Steirischer Herbst (‘Styrian Autumn’) is one of Europe’s leading annual contemporary art festivals (est. 1967). Paranoia TV, curated by Ekaterina Degot, is a digital broadcasting platform and its 2020 edition. steirischerherbst.at, paranoia-tv.com
Blood Mountain Projects is an independent research and curatorial platform with a mission to explore the cultural past present and potential of Central Europe. Directed by Jade Niklai and co-founded with Tom Sloan in Budapest (est. 2010), it is based in Vienna. bloodmountain.org
For enquiries please contact:
Jade Niklai, Director, Blood Mountain Projects
jade [at] bloodmountain.org
