A passion for art

Visual medium

The last decade has seen a large number of video artists emerge from Israel. One of them is Samantha Adler de Oliveira, a Franco-Israeli visual artist based in Tel-Aviv.

She was recently in Bengaluru to showcase broad spectrum of Israeli video works at the Alliance Francaise.
   Although she began her career as a dancer, she switched to video art in the coming years. “Since the age of 11, I was into dancing and even attended a professional training course for three years during high school. Then I moved on to something different — European Studies,” she says.

 “I think I was always into art — my mother is an artist and my family is quite creative — but there’s some point when I decided to come back to it. The reason I mentioned dancing is because it comes into my work — it is the practice that deals with the body in relation to space. And I think the medium of video is used to play with movements, and it is also a way of coming back to dancing but in a different way and incorporating what I've gained by learning about history, politics and the society,” she adds.

She says video art differs from mainstream cinema because it has no budget, set actors, story, location to shoot at or equipment. “I’m not capable of thinking in narrative plots. My mind doesn’t work like that. I work more in terms of moving images. I prefer combining themes and making some kind of a collage or a painting,” she says.

On a journey that began six years ago, she has come a long way. “For such a small country, the video art scene in Israel is quite big. First of all, it has a very vibrant art scene, which includes contemporary dance and music. It might be something about Israel and the state of living on the brink that makes everyone turn to some creative form of expression. But the visual arts scene is particularly big; it has a momentum, a sort of zeitgeist where artists meet each other. You can also say that it's something about the time in Israel that requires a medium like video which is made in real time, about real time events,” she says.

Talking about her work, she says, “For me, it’s very important to relate to places I’m in. Like, I was in Jerusalem for four to five years so I made works about the places around me, whether it was an abandoned hotel room, my room or a view from the roof of my apartment... I like to relate to a starting point and then explore it, make it a bit alien. Instead of taking a place for granted since I pass by it everyday, I try to find a way of twisting it and making it a little more strange,” says Samantha.

What advice does she have for fellow video artists? “Be open to what's going on abroad and always be in dialogue with what is being done around you — in your streets and next door too. That’s what makes art interesting,” she sums up.