Media Gallery – Section A, CICA Musuem
June 8 – 12, 2022
2022.06.08-12
Multiplayer Middle East
I grew up between the physical world, in the geographical region of the Middle East, and the internet realm. During my childhood days, I experienced being torn between the borders of a complicated reality of wars and violent civilian clashes contrasted with fantastical multidimensional virtual spaces. However, gradually, these two existences seemed to have merged. In a way, today the virtual narrates the physical – wars are not a mere chess play between heads of state anymore, but rather a community play, much like an online MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing games*) with real damage.
As an artist emerging from both of these spheres, I investigate this virtual, social and political reality through ready made materials as well as different forms of imaginative and manipulative 3D modelling and animation, trying to bring to light the more subtle yet crucial ways in which the virtual indeed engineers the seemingly ‘real’.
– Ronnie Karfiol
Ronnie Karfiol is an artist, graduate of the Shenkar faculty of Art in Tel Aviv and H.A.W. University Hamburg, Germany. Her work has exhibited in museums such as Petach Tikva Museum of Art & Guttman Museum as well as in galleries like SPEKTRUM Berlin, Galleria R+ Poland & the Center of Contemporary Art (CCA) Tel Aviv. Furthermore, her films screened in Europe and the US on national and international film and media festivals, including FILE Brazil, DocAviv, KFFK Cologne, EMAF – European Media Art Festival, Germany and Currents Festival USA. She is the recipient of Adams Prize for young artist (2017), the Council for Arts (2018) and the Ministry of Culture Independent Artists’ grant (2019) and the Rabinovich Foundation (2021). Her works are part of the collections in both the Guttman Museum [IL] and the Herzliya Museum of Contemorary Art [IL]. Karfiol’s work focuses on new media techniques, countering themes within the obscured borders of technology and humanity; and interrogating how new political, theological and social structures form and thrive in these new portals of being.
