Between video works that imagine departure and those committed to staying, a poetic space of artistic strategies for coping with a conflict-ridden reality unfolds. Dori Ben Alon examines how Israeli artists use the moving image to return to repressed sites of memory and identity, or to propose an alternative mode of being within the existing space. Through the prism of political imagination, she focuses on the ways in which video art allows viewers to experience things that cannot be experienced in physical reality.

Dori Ben Alon is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her dissertation focuses on Israeli video art from the past two decades.

*Image: Shelly Federman, Floating Wall, 2009