The Eye in the Image is Blind
The Eye in the Image is Blind: A Projected Essay is an installation comprised of an 80-slide projection and a workstation. The essay tells in words and images of an eye surgery I witnessed during a clinical course in anaesthesia at the Hebrew University’s medical school. In that operation, the operated eye was transmitted live to a large monitor, creating the dreadful scenery of a giant eye watching itself being operated. This sight was a striking embodiment of the Lacanian “split between the eye and the gaze”.
As the slides appear one after the other, the reflection on sightless gaze progresses, to point at the peculiar though trivial conclusion that every image of an eye is blind, that is, that organic eyes are blinded through the process of their becoming-image. This insight is also materially embedded in the way the physical slide-images are manipulated: they are cut, pierced, itched, and burnt, as a kind of sense-death confirmation.
The work was created in The Owl Lab residency, and exhibited at the Mamuta Art Research Centre, Jerusalem.
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Photographic documentation: Ohr Munk
January 2023