This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini by Amir Yatziv
In 1963, Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini traveled to the Holy Land in search of locations for his film The Gospel According to St. Matthew. The journey, documented in Sopralluoghi in Palestina, ended in disillusion: the landscapes seemed to him too modest, too contemporary, too distant from the image of the Holy Land he carried with him. Pasolini ultimately shot his film in southern Italy, whose villages and deserts stood in for the historical Jerusalem.
In This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini (2012), Yatziv overlays the sound documentation of Pasolini’s scouting trip with images taken from The Gospel According to St. Matthew itself. When the figure of Christ appears on screen, we hear echoes of the director’s thoughts; when the camera surveys the magnificent landscapes of Italy, we hear his descriptions of the disappointing shabbiness of the local views. Christ is cast, as it were, in the role of the filmmaker, and the apostles as his crew.
Working across film, video installation and, more recently, machine-driven performance, Amir Yatziv (*1972; lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo) revisits historical documents, archives and found footage through technologies such as 3D modeling, game engines and artificial intelligence. Fascinated by past narratives and their contemporary interpretation, Yatziv exposes the mechanisms by which images are produced and believed, pointing to the impossibility of a single, coherent historical truth. In 2026, CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo presented "Amir Yatziv: A Report," the artist’s solo exhibition at the Center, built around Peter, an AI-driven character drawn from Franz Kafka.
The result is a seeming reality, convincing perhaps, but not real: a hybrid that undercuts the filmmaker’s megalomania and highlights cinema’s power to maintain fantasy at the expense of reality, probing the gap between a place and its image.
Amir Yatziv, This is Jerusalem, Mr. Pasolini, 2012. Single-channel video, black-and-white, with sound. Courtesy of the artist. The video is presented in the CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo Video Archive alongside "Amir Yatziv: A Report," the artist’s solo exhibition at the Center (2026).
ABOUT THE VIDEO ARCHIVE
The Video Archive at CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo was established in 2000. It comprises over 4000 videos by Israeli and international artists, with works from the 1960s to the present day. What distinguishes the archive is the presence of early Israeli video art – comprising the first experiments in the medium – works featured in VideoZone – International Video Art Biennial (2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010) video documentation of works presented at blurrrr – International Performance Art Biennial (1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007, and 2009), and several works by contemporary video artists. The video archive is a hub for research and education and it functions as a pedagogical tool for several of our educational programs. Screenings based on titles that are currently present in the Archive have been presented in venues in Israel, such as the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and the Jerusalem Film Festival, and abroad at Art in General in New York, OK Center for Contemporary Art in Linz (Austria), the Jewish Museum in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Tate Modern in London, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Centro da Cultura Judaica in São Paulo, and Galerie KUB in Leipzig (Germany) among others. The archive was founded with the support of the late Mr. Arye Sabinsky in memory of his mother, Elizabeth Sabinsky, and with additional support from the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation. In 2020, after twenty years from its establishment, CCA Tel Aviv-Yafo has received a grant from Artis and established a fellowship whose aim is to map, research and restructure the Video Archive with a focus on Israeli artists.
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