PRIVATE DANCER 2007
‘Private Dancer’ is a labyrinthine installation of video and photography work completed by Amir Fattal in Berlin over the last 4 years. In “Private Dancer” Fattal effectively blurs the boundaries between video documentation and performance art, making two of the key topics in his work the photo-shoot process itself and the relationship between the person behind the camera and the person in front.
In the video series ’Changed Position’ 2006, Fattal documents a series of Internet dates with six men in their own apartments. The standard expectation for such dates is a sexual encounter. In these cases, however, a blindfolded Fattal leads each of the participants through a sequence of actions based on prearranged frameworks, each related to the participants personal interests, biographies, fetishes, and unspoken expectations. The end result often resembles sterile sexual surrender game that arouses multi-layered curiosity about previously hidden realities. The viewer witnesses the dates on split video monitors, each screen displaying two synchronized videos: one shot from the perspective of the participant, the other from the camera strapped over Fattal’s blindfold, a perspective that didn’t exist in reality. The images expose the raw duality of the situation.
Additional video work includes: ‘Private Dancers’, 2005, and ‘Private Dancer’, 2005, both of which reflect many of the same themes as ‘Changed Position’ but with Fattal taking a more aggressive and opposite role in the dominant/submissive relationship played out between the artist and the participant.
Photographs included in the exhibition explore the subjects of the human body and human sexuality through the referential lens and influences of pornography, photojournalism, painting and popular/underground culture. The end result is a constructed image that blurs the lines between each of these forms, creating images full of inherent contradictions and ambivalence that edge viewers out of their visual comfort zones. . .
One such example is the ‘Glory-Hole’ set taken inside “Jaxx”, a sex club where Fattal used to work.
“When photographing the glory holes, I wanted to take a sexually charged situation and de-eroticize it. The people shot through the glory holes appear to be in a state of melancholy rather than enjoying a sexual act..”
The instillation at the gallery combines the sex club architecture where the photographs were shot with the private home architecture where the videos were taped.
Fattal’s labyrinth takes the viewer on a journey of voyeurism and anonymity, exploring one of the most intriguing cultural and sexual sub-landscapes of Berlin.