Hinda Weiss
Bio: Hinda Weiss is a photographer and video artist based in New York. Her works are compositions of landscapes that are charged with local histories and merge places and times into nonexisting yet very familiar environments. Weiss has received numerous awards and prizes including the Outset Contemporary Young International Artist Award and the Artis Exhibition Grant. Her works have been exhibited in solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and video screenings in venues such as the Tel Aviv Museum and Palais de Tokyo and can be found in the collections of the Israel Museum, The Shpilman Institute, and other private and public collections.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Among Graves and Ruins, multichannel video installation, 2019
Across an unmarked border, in a building created by colonial ambition, archaeological findings expose relations of power and broken dreams. A long wooden table with animal bones, a large storage jar with scrab (6 in number), a jug and a bronze toggle pin — may have stood in a niche or served as a tombstone. A Blessing for pardon on Judgement day. Before Common Era. Jerusalem.
For Among Graves and Ruins, Weiss filmed in and around the Rockefeller Museum in Jerusalem, formerly called the Palestine Archaeological Museum. Established by the British Mandate in 1938, with funding from the American John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Museum is a unique time capsule of an early 20th century European historical exhibit. Using techniques of collage and video adaptation, Weiss rearranges the museum’s exhibits into a reconstructed landscape of the Valley of Decision, the Tomb of Zechariah and Silwan neighborhood — utilizing the glaring bright Middle East sun to inscribe in stone an imagined dystopian image that resonates to shattered visions of the past.
L to R: Among Graves and Ruins (Video frame, 2019); After the Deserts Goat (Installation view, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017); 5846, 5851 and 5852 vs. the Population and Immigration Authority (Installation view, Ludlow 38, New York City, 2018); Postcard from Tel Aviv (Video frame, 2015)