Ground Control
About the Art Work
Are we able to tour a place we will never visit? What if we were able to imagine a 408-km-long selfie stick? Ground Control is a remotely guided tour. Very remotely. It is based on a protocol of daily collaboration between Eytan and Ofri, the astronaut and the artist. Each day, Ofri will be sending Eytan three sentences. For each sentence Eytan will be sending back a photograph.
The sentences, poetic in essence, will not address the familiar monumental images from the Space Station, nor will they be seeking a specific bit of information. The brief texts will be focusing on the non-monumental moments: minutia, routine, sentiments and unfamiliar sensations, transitions between spaces and transitory states. The three pictures that will be sent from Eytan will become the points of departure for a daily chapter in a lecture performance, which Ofri will be creating during the day. This will be broadcast live from the Rakia channels, to the general audience. Ground Control has, at its core, the possibility to be introduced to and understand a place through dialog.
The “Read and respond” method, the exchange of word and image, is the tool used to create a “serial tour” through an alternative space and time. The daily lecture performance will be a tour in the otherworldly. It will artistically and critically discuss terms such as journeys, tourism, navigation, horizon, front, arrival at a destination, route calculations, close-quarters communication in a long-range geography, and the fine details within the greater space.
This is not an astronaut’s photo-journey; rather, it is a remote-guided tour - a shared navigation or sorts, through ideas, images, thoughts and distances in which Ofri uses Eytan and becomes an eye witness that cannot see things for herself. Eytan becomes her eyes, our eyes, and in certain senses, he becomes the “eyes of Israel”.
Ofri Cnaani
About the artists
Ofri Cnaani
Ofri Cnaani is a media artist combining installations. Born in Kibbutz Kabri, she now lives in London. Currently working on her Ph.D., she is a researcher and fellow lecturer in the curation and visual culture program at the University of London. Her works have been exhibited in the Tate Museum, Britain; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Inhotim Institute, Brazil; the Israel Museum; the Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki; PS1/MoMA, New York; BMW Guggenheim, New York; the Fischer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Twister, the Museum of Contemporary Arts Network in Lombardy, Italy; the Herzliya Museum of Art, Israel; the Moscow Biennale; the Bronx Museum of Art, New York; Kunsthalle Wien; the Arnolfini Fund Museum, Bristol; the Tel Aviv Museum, Israel and others. Prior to her most recent move to London, she lived in New York, where she was a staff member at the School of Visual Arts, where she also led the program entitled “City as a Site: Public Performance + Social Interventions”.