Stories From the Old Ruin

Irit Batsry’s hallucinatory soundtrack and disturbing images create an eerie and all too realistic narrative of destruction and ruin. This is a faked report of an imaginary investigation of an event that never happened. Batsry’s purposeful avoidance of documentary only serves to give her allusions to impending disaster more force. Batsry borrows her images largely from the commercial media; pictures of a sprinter, two Oriental women fending off the camera with their hands, a figure skater; all dissolve and are reconstructed electronically so that their ordinariness and lifeless stillness seem a cover for erotic passions and rapid motion. -lux.org.uk