Daniella meroz

With a title alluding to Victory over the Sun, the 1913 Russian futurist opera, Daniella Meroz’s video confronts two opposing bodily ideals as epitomized in two aesthetisized spectacles staged in Germany: Oskar Schlemer’’s Triadic Ballet from 1922, and Olympia, the 1938 film by Leni Riefenstahl, a documentation of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. A former actress, Riefenstahl went on to become the Third Reich’s emblematic filmmaker. In Olympia she harnessed her innovative cinematic talents toward praising the well-proportioned bodies of athletes – a “new body” in the mold of Nazi ideology; a body meant to counter an equally new – albeit grotesquely exaggerated – a body that figured in the modernist art of the Bauhaus school. Schlemer’s bodies are mechanical figures, specimens adapted to a new society. Setting her video in a stadium, Meroz saddles her performers in outsized geometrical extensions that, rather than impeding movement, recall Schlemer’’s visual vocabulary but also the bouncy props used in reality TV. Performing synchronized drills, races, or fights, performers are captured from below, an angle that – as with Riefenstahl – aggrandizes the body. However, Meroz allows for direct sunlight to highlight every minor imperfection, placing the scene at the threshold of success and failure, the real and ideal. Text by Sally Heftel.

The caterpillar is a transitional stage, a stepping stone en route to total transformation. In the evolution of the relationship between man and the rest of nature, the end of this route is still hard to imagine. Will it be directed towards exploitation and annihilation, or rather towards a synergy which will reorganize the power balance currently in place? Caterpillar offers a new evolutionary stage, a human-animal hybrid which marks a possible trajectory. Like its fantastic image in the story of Alice, Meroz offers a hallucinatory experience in search of a way out of Wonderland, or in this case –Desert-land – as a reflection of reality.

The video work Bouncing Ball shows a polarized world forged by just two actions – hitting the ball and escaping from it. On manicured lawns, a row of figures are seen being subjected to relentless attack from a single game ball, or running from it. The ball offers the central viewpoint of the work and is its plot generator. The video presents an imaginary world populated by characters that are fantastic, colorful, and humorous but also vulnerable. Their role is defined by their shape, attire, and attributes. Their limitations and narrow worldview, too, serve their destiny in the world. As in mythological plots or in superhero depictions, the imprint and characterization of the figures are deterministic, depending on their intended role in the great scheme of things.