One work from the CCA video archive:

Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim, Untitled (The Vow), 2009, video, 8:48 min.

Since the 1990s, Hila Lulu Lin Farah Kufer Birim has produced a series of video works in which a single performative action is executed for the camera, usually utilizing her own body. These actions interweave pleasure and torture, seduction and resistance into surreal images that have become idiosyncratic to her oeuvre.

In this work, a decisive-yet-absurd action chains the exaggeratedly feminine hand to a stone.  A symbol of uprising is constrained. Instead of posing an outward threat, it turns the hand into a permanently clenched fist: a burden from which there is no escape. The soundtrack occasionally plays "Ride of the Valkyries" from Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküreת, an iconic and controversial piece that was favored by the Nazi regime. In Israel, there is an unofficial boycott of Wagner's works, but in global popular culture, this piece has received numerous representations, the most famous of which is the helicopter attack scene in the film Apocalypse Now (directed by Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). While in the opera, the Valkyries—entities in Norse mythology—gather the bodies of heroic warriors who perished in battle to the hall of the god Odin until the battle of the end of days, the scene in Coppola's film powerfully embodies the cruelty, madness, and absurdity of war.

The original title of the work, Untitled (Without a Vow), has been replaced for this display with the Untitled (The Vow).

Cinematography: Nili Aslan

Sound: Guy Levi

Thanks: Present Absentee Farah Kufer Birim