Targeted Killing
Media City Seoul 2010
TRUST
07.09.10 – 17.11.10
Media City Seoul presents the 6th edition of the biennial exhibition under the title ‘Trust’, comprising work of 46 international artists.
Seoul Museum of Art, Gyenghuigung Annex of Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul Museum of History and Simpson Memorial Hall (EWHA Girsl High School).
Curatorial team: Sunjung KIM (Artistic director, Media City Seoul 2010) and co-curators Clara KIM (Director/Curator of Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles), Nicolaus SCHAFHAUSEN (Director of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam), and SUMITOMO Fumihiko (Curator, Arts Initiative Tokyo, Tokyo).
“Targeted Killing”, the new project Miki Kratsman is working upon, examines the term “focused foiling” coined by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces). In the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the IDF uses this term against those it considers proven to have intentions of performing a specific act of violence in the very near future or to be linked indirectly with several acts of violence thus raising the likelihood that his or her assassination would disrupt similar activities in the future. The photographs in this series were shot using a special lens, which is commonly used by IDF UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). The outcome is an illusory moment – an image of the seconds before a targeted killing. The photographs draw on the images disseminated by the IDF via the media to the Israeli public in the aftermath of events of this type.
All the photographs in “Targeted Killing” were taken from Mount Scopus, located in northeast Jerusalem and overlooking the Palestinian villages surrounding it. Mount Scopus has been strategically important as a base from which to attack the city since antiquity, as a result of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, parts of Mount Scopus became a UN protected Jewish property exclave within Jordanian-occupied territory until the Six-Day War in 1967. Today, Mount Scopus lies within the municipal boundaries of the city of Jerusalem. All the photographed characters in Kratsman's “Targeted Killing” are innocent Palestinian civilians going about their daily lives. However, the way they are being photographed echoes that of “suspects” and so evokes and reinforces this image in the eyes of the viewer.
Miki Kratsman was born in 1959, Argentina and immigrated to Israel in 1971. His photographs appear regularly in “Ha'aretz” newspaper in the column “The Twilight Zone” on which he is signed together with the journalist Gideon Levi. Since 2006 he presides as head of the photography department of Bezalel academy of arts, Jerusalem. Kratsman exhibits consistently, in Israel and throughout the world.
