Fractured Testimonies
from Palestine
Rescheduled to July 10th

TIRTZA EVEN & TOBY MILLMAN

Tirtza Even and Toby Millman each convey their experiences of personal encounters in Palestine in the exhibition Fractured testimonies from Palestine. The two projects, Once a Wall, or Ripple Remains by Tirtza Even and Access and Closure by Toby Millman, both result from extensive encounters and visits in Palestine - on both sides of the borders dividing the occupied territories and Israel - during several periods spanning 1998 to 2011.

Millman and Even’s encounters were translated into a body of visual and written material and include paper cutout maps and drawings, photographs, 3-D animations and video loops, as well as three individual book renderings of the same and expanded material.

The two records, in very distinct ways, aim to incorporate the images’ passage through media and through the history impacting their perception. Thus, they more and less directly address signs of forceful partitioning and containment beginning with the 1948 war and leading to the construction of the wall, and urgently, Israel’s ongoing military siege and assault in Gaza.

Using text that reflects on and questions the perception of the visual material, the exhibition attempts to address the characteristics and consequences of the ongoing Israeli occupation of life in Palestine.

A version of this exhibition was first presented at the AC Institute in 2010.

Ten years later, the themes and stories the initial exhibition addressed remain acutely relevant.

Tirtza Even - A practicing documentary-maker and video artist, Tirtza Even has produced both linear and interactive video work that has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, at the Whitney Biennial, the Johannesburg Biennial, as well as in many galleries, museums and festivals in the U.S., Israel and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight, RIDM Rotterdam Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, New York Video Festival, Lincoln Center. It has won numerous grants and awards, including 3ARTs Visual Arts Award, Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship, Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, Fledgling Distribution Fund, Artadia Awards, Chicago (winner of top award); Golden Gate Awards Certificate-of-Merit, San Francisco International Film Festival; Media Arts Award, The Jerome Foundation; Individual Artists Program Awards, NYSCA, and many others; and has been purchased for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Jewish Museum (NY), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), among others. Even has been an invited guest and featured speaker at many conferences and university programs, including the Whitney Museum Seminar series, MIT Doc Lab, the Digital Flaherty Seminar, SXSW Interactive Conference, Poetics and Politics Symposium, Art Pace annual panel, ACM Multimedia, the Performance Studies International conference (PSI), the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference (SLSA). Her work is distributed by Heure Exquise, France, Video Data Bank (VDB) and Groupe Intervention Video (GIV), Canada. Even is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Film, Video, New Media, and Animation department.

Toby Millman - is a multidisciplinary visual artist who works with traditional and emergent forms of printmaking as well as collage, cut paper, photography and book arts. She is a recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and her work has been shown throughout the US and internationally at the Gallerie SAW Gallery in Ottawa, Canada, the Festival International d’Art Vidéo in Casablanca, Morocco, International Print Center New York and the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has been an artist in residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, Women’s Studio Workshop, Penland School of Crafts, Can Serrat in Catalonia and the Qattan Foundation in Ramallah. Her artist books are in numerous public collections including the Getty Research Institute, the Miriam and Ira Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at the New York Public Library, the Special Collections Libraries at Harvard, Columbia and Yale Universities, and the Art and Ethnography Museum at Birzeit University. Millman currently lives in Hamtramck, a two-square mile city surrounded by the City of Detroit, and teaches printmaking and drawing at the Residential College at University of Michigan.