Naomi Tereza Salmon:
optimistic—disease—facility
BORIS LURIE: New York - Buchenwald
Video Documentary 58 min
Weimar-New York 2003
PLOT : The life and work of Boris Lurie creates a radical, brusque, and at the same time a poetic cosmos. In New York where Lurie lives within his collages, the experience of the Nazi concentration camps seeps through everything. Apartment studio and laboratory all reflect a very personal artistic view of the past which surrounds him in the present.
After meeting the artist Naomi Tereza Salmon (who lives and works in Germany), at Buchenwald during the retrospective exhibition of his works in 1998/99, he gave her permission to document his apartment, studio and storage space. A dialogue developed, covering a range of issues, mainly about the past, about living in New York, about the Palestinian issue, including discussions on Stalin and capitalism.
The film is a result of this encounter, laconically trying to capture the authentic situation, and was made as a low budget project. Considering the fact that Lurie is the founder of the No!art movement, the making of the film is inspired by its manifest, which presents an opposition to american mass culture and to the commercalizing process of art, putting in question the scene of mainstream and pop art, creating a genuine ideological and fundamental aesthetic approach of its own.
The music, which was composed specifically for this purpose by the German music and internet performer Jan Brüggemeier (pingfm — internet radio broadcasting), serves as an adhesive as well as an interpretative component. An examination of the metaphysical space, focusing on the encounter between the two artists and the experiences of each of them with their immediate surrounding takes place. The film offers no answers but presents the questions which arise in it in a clear way for the viewer to reflect on them.
About Naomi Tereza Salmon: Born 1965 in Jerusalem. 1986-88 Studied photography at Hadassa College in Jerusalem. 1990 Working scholarship from the America-Israel Culture Foundation. 1991 Working residency in Berlin. In 2001 she participated in the Moving workshop Non-Silk Way through Kazakhstan. In 2002 followed a working scholarship for visual arts from the Thuringian Ministry of Science, Research and Art. In 2003/04 she was a guest lecturer at the Design Faculty of the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Salmon works as a freelance curator and as an advisory board member and co-host for the independent local radio station Radio Lotte. Since 2003 she has been a member of the Raste Gruppe, a project for electronic music and audio art in Weimar. Sensitive photographs and spatial installations paired with videos are her critical field of work. Her longing is the there in the here. Lives and works in Zurich (Switzerland). ► more
