Dafna Maimon

The Award Winning Show

Screening

Background evening

13/03/2009

On 31 May 2009, 1646 screened two video works by Dafna Maimon on the occasion of Hoogtij, The Hague’s quarterly route along cultural initiatives, galleries and project spaces.

Dafna Maimon’s works are mostly short, single channel video pieces, which swing between witty one-liners, registrations of staged performative acts and narrative filmmaking. Video is Maimon’s main medium but formally her work relates to high production filmmaking and attempts to copy the “greater than life” aspect of classic cinema and the contradictory disgust she feels for its decadence.

The quote from May West ‘too much of a good thing can become wonderful’ is often applicable to describe Dafna Maimon’s work. She embraces the overkill and grabs the viewers attention from a place bordering disturbance or embarrassment.

On 31 May she will show Muse on Break, a video piece made in 2012. In this video an amateur actor is re-siting fragmented text from the artists stream of consciousness, creating a dual portrait of both the actor and the artist. The notion of the self is here explored through both physical and mental experience. The other video on display will be Like Seitlax (2011). Here four Finnish/Swedish teenagers budding into manhood are removed from modern context in Like Seitlax via never-ending summer days in the disturbingly quiet countryside village Seitlax in Finland. Speaking only in direct quotations of existentialist philosophers Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, they ponder the eternal dilemma of existence as they traverse their teenage lives.

Info

About Dafna Maimon: Dafa Maimon (1982) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam and received her MFA at the Sandberg Institute in 2008. She has exhibited previously at 1646 in 2009.