Michal Helfman / Running Out of History
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“The main work in the exhibition is the video “Running Out of History”. The work is based on my recordings of a series of meetings conducted in 2015 between myself and Gal Luski, chair and founder of the humanitarian organization Israeli Flying Aid. In the past seven and a half years, Luski and her volunteers operated within Syria, bringing in massive amounts of humanitarian aid for those deprived of any other help, including that of the UN, due to their resistance to the government.

What made me approach Luski, was the concept of smuggling, both for being an active image in the reality of our time, but mostly for being a tactic mechanism activating similarly to art: detecting a path which has not yet been taken, choosing position over opinion while cutting through the existing discourse, and inserting uninvited content which emerges as if from nothingness. My wish was to learn from and use Luski’s smuggling mechanism, only Luski’s smuggling act is an activist one, and is therefore substantive within reality, while the presence and operation of the artistic smuggling is much harder to grasp and quantify…”

M. Helfman