Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat were both born in Israel but are today residents of Brussels. Sirah studied at the P.A.R.T.S. school of performing arts while Eitan studied audiovisual art at the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. The Beursschouwburg is showing two of the video works created by the young artists, Journal and Printed Matter*. The underlying theme of both the works involves historical photographs taken by Sirah’s father, André Brutmann (1947-2002), who worked as a freelance press photographer in the Middle East.

Printed Matter

consists of contact prints and negatives of the first and second intifadas and the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, followed by images of family members reading or his daughter’s birth. The voice-over is provided by Sirah’s mother, Hanne Foighel, who travels through in time on the back of her memories, covering not only the political history of the region but also the intimacy of family life. Geopolitics and the photographer’s home life become one on a roll of film.

Journal

meanwhile focuses on a series of photos capturing a moment in time. Brutmann was tasked with photographing official visits to Yad Vashem*, snapping dignitaries standing beside the iconic image that summed up the entire Holocaust – a hut in Buchenwald jammed with emaciated prisoners staring straight into the camera lens. Efrat and Brutmann have selected a number of shots from the series and exhibited them in the Wiels art center in Brussels. The video contains footage taken using a camera that wandered around the exhibition at various stages.

Questions Session

After the films and a short break, the artists invite you for a questions session.
Questions is a discursive practice that was born out of the need to find new ways of addressing political and artistic discourse and give an answer to our need to constantly reformulate and think ideas, theories, concepts, in and out of language.

The basis of the technique behind the practice is a number of simple rules implemented by the participants:

• The discussion is held only by asking questions, each participant can ask as many questions as wanted and there is no predetermined order of speakers
• Each question needs to relate to the question or questions before it
• Each question has to be directed to all participants and not to a specific person
• Each participant can repeat a question that was asked earlier in the discussion

Journal