For further information please download the respective Forum Expanded sheet (PDF).
The Law of the Pursuer is an essay exhibition by Amos Gitai revolving around some of the issues and themes raised in his film, Rabin, the Last Day (2015), about the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on 4 November 1995. Featuring unreleased research material and film footage from Gitai’s archive and collected over the course of the last twenty years, the exhibition’s central piece is a new video installation with a performative element commissioned by SAVVY Contemporary questioning the shifting concept of democracy and addressing the problem of extremisms and the current crisis of politics. Resonating with the structure of the film, his installation is a whirlwind of discourse surrounding the terrible and confounding act of violence that took place in Tel Aviv, while also becoming a metaphor of the consequences of a polarized and poisonous atmosphere of political extremism. The Law of the Pursuer shows how inflammatory and fundamentalist language can instill violence and sow the seeds of brutality, it is an examination and a psychoanalytical portrait of a traumatized political context and society speaking to the one we are living in today.
Amos Gitai, born in 1950 in Haifa, Israel, is a filmmaker based in Paris and Haifa, mainly known for making documentaries and feature films dealing with the Middle East and the Jewish-Arab conflict. He holds a degree in Architecture from the Technion in Haifa and a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Gitai had to interrupt his architecture studies as he was called up to reserve service as part of a helicopter rescue crew. While serving, he shot 8mm film footage of the fighting, claiming this served as his entry into the world of filmmaking. To date Gitai has created over 90 works of art over 44 years. His work has been presented in several major retrospectives and in film festivals around the world.
Curatorial Team: Elena Agudio, Antonia Alampi, Abhishek Nilamber
Commissioned by: SAVVY Contemporary
Photo: © Amos Gitai
