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Dor Guez: The Sick Man Of Europe

  • Art, Installation
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
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Time Out says

3 out of 5 stars

An installation reflecting on military history and the current political climate of the middle east.

There are different types of casualty in war. Most immediately, there are those killed or physically injured. But, more subtly and insidiously, there are longer-term horrors, psychic wounds that eat away at an individual or a society. It’s these aspects that young Israeli artist Dor Guez explores in his short film chronicling the life of the similarly named D Guez, a Tunisian Jewish painter who was conscripted to fight for Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and has since undergone treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Entitled ‘The Painter’, the piece is a cross between a regular documentary and something more complex. You get various typical elements – a voiceover narration by the older Guez, highlighted sections of letters, stills taken from defaced photographs – but also moments where the film shifts its focus to processes of documentation itself. Whirring photocopy machines replicate paper records, while panning close-ups of Guez’s works turn out not to depict his actual paintings at all, but rather scanograms – a medical imaging process that reveals the cracks and flakes in the paint’s surface, the metaphorical wounds. The idea is to evoke deep structures of memory and erasure, the ways that events can be blocked out or histories recovered.

The film never quite comes together. There are too many whimsical elements – quirky animations and lilting oud music. And while the piece isn’t long or immersive enough to really draw you in, nor is it concise enough to be completely impactful. But it’s a laudable concept. An adjoining room of archival materials – more scanograms, books, photos, and so on – seems superfluous. And when the film starts describing the painter’s secret affair with his future wife, a Christian Palestinian, you get the sense that there are just too many big and diverse ideas – to do with history, truth and ethnicity – being crammed into one, rather slight show. However, ‘The Painter’ is only the first instalment of a multi-part project, collectively entitled ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ (the term used to describe the crumbling Ottoman Empire, from which the present-day Middle East was shaped). Hopefully this broader canvas will ultimately prove more effective.

Gabriel Coxhead

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