Born in 1972, lives and works in Tel Aviv
Dream, 2012, video, 4:24 min.
Avner Shahaf’s work is based on a technique devised by the Surrealist Movement – the “exquisite corpse.” In this method, a group of people draws together an image of a person. Each member discreetly draws, in turn, a different part of the human body and then folds the paper over leaving only the edge of his or her drawing showing before passing it on to the next person. Passing from hand to hand, the piece of paper is folded over and over again and is gradually filled up. Finally, when the folded sheet is opened and straightened, the deformed and artificial figure is revealed – the “exquisite corpse.” The surrealists utilized this principle of chance to compose images devoid of any causal logic.
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Shahaf is appropriating a surrealist principle to deal with the surrealist main subject matter – the dream, and with a segment of the population so dear to them due to its innate rich imagination – children. He applies this principle to documentary cinema by recording dreams of children from various social strata and composing them into a cinematic hybrid that oscillates between fiction and reality.
Editing plays a major role in his film: on the one hand, by breaking the continuity, it expresses the incoherence of dreams, their shifts in time and space; and on the other hand, it splices and joins together dreams of different children in one continuous common narrative. In this way, Shahaf pieces together a dream and a collective sub-conscious constructed of a chain of fragments. Dreamt and formed by a group of children in 2012 Israel, it constitutes an archive of fear and horror-related images so characteristic of children’s dreams.
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