Dani Gal
Guest of Moviment
Born in Jerusalem in 1975, Dani Gal now lives in Berlin.
His work takes the form of films, books and installations which explore our attitude to history and truth.
Intended as a critical re-reading of relations between Israel, Germany and Palestine, his films reveal to viewers how elements from the past may be manipulated, reactivated or reinvented. The trilogy An Elaborate Gesture of Pastness (2011-2018) thus examines various narratives linked to Nazism, the Holocaust and Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, by blending historical facts, storylines and fictional dialogues.
Attentive as he is to the use of sound as a constituent element of narrative and a collective memory to be manipulated, he has collected several hundred historical speeches on vinyl (Historical Records, 2005-2018) and devoted one of his most recent films (Three Works of Piano, 2022) to silence, including a representation of John Cage’s famous 4’33 interrupted by an audience singing an Israeli nationalist anthem.
Don du Fonds Artis, Amis du Centre Pompidou, 2022. Vue de l'installation à la Kunsthalle Schirn, Frankfurt, 2018
Courtesy the artist and Kadel Willborn, Düsseldorf
Dani Gal
Historical Records, Part 3 (2005-2018)
Visual arts Installation, performance
Dani Gal’s multimedia project Historical Records, Part 3 (2005-2018) questions our relationship to history and the truth, the way in which elements from the past can be manipulated, reactivated or reinvented.
Over the course of almost 15 years, Dani Gal has patiently purchased and amassed a collection of more than 700 vinyl recordings of historic speeches linked to major political and social events of the 20th century. In doing so, the artist was less concerned about conserving and archiving the historic speeches and more interested in listening to the unique "noise" specific to the enunciative context of each sound recording, and in the substance of the recording medium and its packaging: the graphic compositions of the sleeves, amplified voices, speech recorded from a later radio broadcast of the "original", during which other layers of voices and music are added, thus adding a new layer of history.
Although the vinyl covers constitute a new kind of history painting put together only with ready-made elements, the collection of recordings is in the tradition of the concrete music of Pauline Oliveros and Pierre Schaeffer.
Continuous exhibition
Launch of the work by the artist – Wednesday, 24 and Thursday, 25 May 2023
