Miri Segal | Miriage

Curator: Aya Lurie

Feb. 24, 2018 - June 2, 2018

At the heart of Miri Segal’s exhibition lies a new and essentially experimental project: Crushed Spirits: Exercises in Continental Philosophy. Surrounding it is a selection of her previous works, from 1998 to the present, which interact with it in various ways and offer keys to Segal’s artistic language as it has crystallized over the past twenty years. Segal’s works use a variety of media – including video, light and text, treated objects, and photographic and computer-manipulated imagery. They also involve a variety of sensory and physical manipulations, physical illusions, word games and an enticing technological experience – all in a bid to put into question our “natural” viewpoint and to present it as something pre-structured. Segal’s works reflect her interest in philosophical questions about existence, technological ethics, and economic-political regimes.

She does this not only by constructing an illusion that retains the potential of revealing its formative manipulative (emotional and technological) mechanism, but also through linguistic devices that metaphorically highlight the limitations of our actions and their adherence to and dependence on existing constructs of language and logic. Segal thereby creates symbolic situations and representations through which she invites us to engage in a visual, tangible, intimate and regulated encounter with the experience of human existence, as well as the structures of thought and the regime that regulate it.

The exhibition’s title is a portmanteau word combining the artist’s name, Miri, and mirage. It is against this backdrop that the recurring presence of phantoms that pervade Miri Segal’s exhibition may be understood. Some of them are references to unreal or virtual presences. Thus, in her early work, Vapor (The Poetic Principle) (1998), the existence of something is signaled by its absence: a video of wind blowing through trees is projected onto the whirring blades of an electric fan – as a kind of direct, real, visual and sensual summoning of the image of the Bible’s first murder victim, Abel (after whom the work is titled in Hebrew). In other works of hers, the ghosts pertain to specific objects of human longing. For example, the work Neverfall is a tribute to the artist Gideon Gechtman in the form of a “collaboration” with him after his death. In her new work, Lament (2018) Segal sings Natan Alterman’s famous lullaby Lailah, Lailah (“Night, Night”) which her mother used to sing to her as a child.

Segal’s new project, Crushed Spirits: Exercises in Continental Philosophy, is based on the play Ahmed the Philosopher (2014) by the French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937). It also references the famous film by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972), based on the eponymous book by Polish writer Stanisław Lem. In her work, Segal includes one of the most famous scenes in the film, in which the protagonist, who has embarked on a journey to explore the mysterious planet Solaris, discovers to his horror his dead wife apparently resurrected before his eyes. Lem argued that all innovative inventions are abused by its users. “People will always find ways to pervert progress for their own needs,” he said in one of the most recent interviews he has given. “The Internet, for example, is a network that was originally intended for the exchange of scientific information. In fact, it has become a tool in the service of terror, pornography and the ills that mankind loves so much.” Segal, whose work makes extensive use of advanced technologies, is similarly fiercely critical of them. Her works engage with the ethical challenges in today’s world given the advanced technologies and economic and political forces operating on the Internet, in social media, virtual simulations, apps, and above all in the face of the looming presence of Artificial Intelligence – a new spectral presence in our midst.

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