One of the pivotal components of ‘Crossings’ was a layered installation in our Kirk Gallery. The space was used to unpack an essay written by Berlin-based writer Boaz Levin for the third iteration of the publication Next Spring titled ‘On Distance’. Included in the installation was a reading of this essay by the author. This reading is now available here.
Levin’s essay focusses on the film ‘Havarie’, by Philip Sheffner and Merle Kröger. This film repurposes a short, amateur video clip uploaded to YouTube by its author Terry Diamond, a passenger on board a cruise liner, who caught on camera a mid-Mediterranean encounter with a boat-load of refugees. Levin offers a powerful and multi-facetted reading of the film. He uses the occasion to offer his own meditations on distance. These draw on philosophy, art history, film theory and autobiography, as he recounts his own separation from his parents, who live in Jerusalem, and the alienating effects of communicating with them through his computer screen.
[Image: Still from Philip Scheffner, ‘Havarie’, 2016]