INTERCONTINENTAL

In ‘Intercontinental’ Atsmon Ganor exhibits two types of works – a large video projection of his animation: ‘Multiple Heads’ (Canada, 2002. 16.19 minutes in a seamless loop), and a series of more than 30 map assemblages. These were created from the pages of the Yedioth Aharonot Atlas that was published in the 60’s. The maps were distributed to the Yedioth Aharonot newspaper readers in the weekend issues as a promotion that maintained an educational aspect: “know the world.”

In a series of simple acts of cutting, tearing, creasing and folding Ganor re-assembles the maps. He creates a fictional, 3  dimensional topography: a new hybrid world that is born from a mixing up of borders and geological formations. Suggesting the utopian and the catastrophic, these topographical landscapes appear as a marvel and at the same time as an unsettling event – as an expression of inner restless tectonic forces and folds. The ‘mountains-lumps’, the ‘island-humps’, the ‘continent-growths’, from a distant horizon, send an echo of  the topography of the human body, without being mimetic.

The acts of folding and creasing are translated in the animation ‘Multiple Heads’ to a curved narrative; one that conjoins the sensual with the disturbing and the ridiculous with the poetic.  In various scenes, violence and tenderness appear as two faces of one coin. They determine the ‘psyche’ of this piece: a superimposition of political, physical and mental borders in a constant exchange that involves both a conflict and consolation.

The spatial and territorial is transformed from one scene to another. The flat surface of the screen or the lines of the geographical map change to become a sensual/sexual interiority, or an abyssal depth. The ground seems as an elusive element. It is constantly established and destroyed in the conjunction between reality and fantasy.  Space is emphasized not only by different lines of direction and movement, but also by the particular story lines. These involve absurd interactions between various images such as heads, body parts, animals, chains of mountains, geographical maps and words. The story lines delineate themselves in a rhizomatic manner.  Splitting one from the other, multiplying in unpredictable directions, they make any moral or end impossible.  Following the circular structure of Multiple Heads, the end point meets the point of origin.  At this meeting point what is revealed is that the end is the origin.