Copy Farm

Jonathan Omer Mizrahi is an artist and filmmaker who works mainly with video and performance. In his works, Mizrahi explores power relations with projects that transpire at the encounter of creativity and emergency. In “Musarra Mix 24,” Mizrahi presents a work that navigates the intersections of land, territory, agriculture, and war. The work combines images from the agricultural fields along the border with Gaza, in the Otef region, the Israeli frontier settlements, and inside the Strip, which, due to the war, are endangered and have become battlefields. Against the backdrop of destruction, bereavement, and hunger, the fields form an image of today’s borderscape. Agriculture is expressed in the poster “נחס نَحْس” (roughly translated from arabic and hebrew to “jinx”) in the installation, where the farmer figure is composed of a collage of Israeli, Palestinian, and Thai farmers, reflecting the historical identity of agricultural workers in Israel.

In the video work, which consists of filmed materials and found footage, the drone camera is used as the central perspective, serving as a common tool for both the military and agriculture. Over the Israel-Gaza border, the drone chases kites, some of which were sent by a Gazan resistance group in 2018 to set fire to the Israeli frontier fields in what was named in Israel arson terrorism.

In “Copy Farm,” Mizrahi borrows the practice of duplication, used by 20th-century Pop artists, for observational practice against the backdrop of a bacchanal celebration of the land.