In his video installation, Haviv Kaptzon places the character Weltschmerz amidst a world that has no grip and offers no solid ground beneath our feet. He has modeled his wondrous protagonist after the German notion, which translates as “sorrow of the world,” or “world-sorrow.” As a phenomenon, Weltschmerz typifies German Romanticism, but is as apt today as it was in the nineteenth century. Signifying a sadness about life, it simultaneously describes a sense of pain suffered in the world and at the state of the world, and the knowledge that the two are intrinsically linked. It is the feeling we have when we realize the world is not what it ought to be; when we come face-to-face with the unknowable “why” of suffering.
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