"In 2006, at the time when she was teaching video at the Karlsruhe Center for Art and Media (ZKM), Pereg produced two animal pieces at Karlsruhe Zoo, 1 Sleeps and 67 Bows. In the first, she filmed a pink flamingo standing asleep on one leg, its beak curled up in its feathers; somewhere between an organism and a plant, a ball of feathers wavering slightly on its stem. The second piece responds to the first as a group portrait answers a single portrait: a flock of flamingos make bending movements at the sharp crack of a rifle (the post-synchronized sound of the detonation is a special effect: for days on end, the artist taught the birds to react to her own gestures as one ritual responding to the other). The choreographed flamingos, bending in time, are stylized and turned into a decorative frieze, just as the single bird in 1 Sleeps was turned into a flower, blurring the boundaries between the figure and the living thing. “To decorate,” wrote Karl Philipp Moritz in the mid neo-classical 18th century, “is to animate things that are dead.”(1) But the decorative impulse also answers an animist inquiry to ward off ill fortune. The decorative is linked to the supernatural and the ornament has a magical dimension; its symmetries and repetitions are formulary rituals and, like the plant-like bird motif, the strip of images formed by the rhythmic cortege of flamingos takes on an inseparably vitalist yet funerary meaning". Read More...

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Philippe-Alain Michaud: “The Burial Chamber” as it appears in the monograph KEPT ALIVE (Publisher: Tel Aviv Museum of Art. March 2011)

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