Asylum explores a particularly topical subject, both in Israel andaround the world: the cultural displacement of people who have left their countries and try to assimilate in a culture foreign to them. But more than the figures themselves, the work presents our stereotypical view of them, for the figures are stripped of individuality and each group of people depicted is characterized by stereotypes associated with their ethnicity and jobs.

A hundred and twenty performers – Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish, Kosovan-Albanian, Romani, Afghan and others – participate in the work, all of whom Rosefeldt met in asylum seekers’ hostels, on the streets, in pubs, lubs, and social institutions. They all seem doomed to a Sisyphean fate of performing strange, meaningless tasks: men stacking piles of newspapers while wind produced by a giant turbine blows them away; women vacuum-cleaning a cactus garden; Asian cooks sitting in a giant cage, tearing up the Styrofoam packaging of takeaway food. In the short version of the work the scenes of the different groups, which were originally projected each on its own screen, are interwoven. At the end of the video they all sing together, a cohesive chorus voicing a wordless cry.

{1} Robert Seidel, “Inside the Hedge Fund Manager’s Head: Interview with Julian Rosefeldt,” in Julian Rosefeldt: World-Making: Film and Photo Works 2001–2011, exh. cat. (Taipei: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2012), p. 44.

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