Author Description

The ICA present the first UK institutional solo exhibition of artist Dor Guez in collaboration with The Mosaic Rooms. As an artist of Christian Palestinian and Jewish Tunisian descent, living in Jaffa, he is considered a leading and critical voice from the Middle East whose practice questions contemporary art’s role in narrating unwritten histories. Entitled ‘The Painter’ this new installation is the first of five from a new body of work, The Sick Man of Europe. Guez’s most ambitious project to date, it reflects on the military history and current political climate of the Middle East through the creative practices of individual soldiers from the region.00The installation presents the story of a painter-turned-soldier, a Jewish Tunisian who immigrated to Israel. The ’painter’ was conscripted to the Yom Kippur War as a reservist soldier in 1973 and, in recent years, has undergone psychiatric treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, part of which consists of repeatedly recording his memories of the war. These recordings are central to Guez’s new work, and relate directly to his artistic strategy of repetition and storytelling in re-evaluating accounts of the past.0Exhibition: ICA, Mosaic Room, London, UK (03.02-12.04.2015).