Ismail B. (°1981, Palestinian Territory) is an artist who mainly works with film. By studying sign processes, signification and communication, B. tries to grasp language. Transformed into art, language becomes an ornament. At that moment, lots of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are inherent to the phenomenon, come to the surface.
His films focus on the inability of communication which is used to visualise reality, the attempt of dialogue, the dissonance between form and content and the dysfunctions of language. In short, the lack of clear references are key elements in the work. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘corporate world’, he reflects on the closely related subjects of archive and memory. This often results in an examination of both the human need for ‘conclusive’ stories and the question whether anecdotes ‘fictionalise’ history.
His works demonstrate how life extends beyond its own subjective limits and often tells a story about the effects of global cultural interaction over the latter half of the twentieth century. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, between our own ‘cannibal’ and ‘civilized’ selves. By investigating language on a meta-level, he makes work that generates diverse meanings. Associations and meanings collide. Space becomes time and language becomes image.
His works question the conditions of appearance of an image in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations and ideas normally function. By using an ever-growing archive of found documents to create autonomous artworks, his works references post-colonial theory as well as the avant-garde or the post-modern and the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the logic of the capitalist market system.
His works are an investigation into representations of (seemingly) concrete ages and situations as well as depictions and ideas that can only be realized in film. With Plato’s allegory of the cave in mind, he makes work that deals with the documentation of events and the question of how they can be presented. The work tries to express this with the help of physics and technology, but not by telling a story or creating a metaphor.
His works are an investigation of concepts such as authenticity and objectivity by using an encyclopaedic approach and quasi-scientific precision and by referencing documentaries, ‘fact-fiction’ and popular scientific equivalents. Ismail B. currently lives and works in Berlin.
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