A Interloper

Nathan Witt’s practice examines notions of where our motives aberrate using A4 texts specifically as counter-images, or artworks that do not need to be made.

Witt has been examining religious and technological notions of time, which started in Jerusalem in 2012 / 5773 / 1434 where he set his Gmail Calendar to Hijri, Ha’luach, Persian, Julian and Gregorian times and started to stream his communal activities, focusing on the notion that the world cannot collectively agree on what year it is. There is a constant fascination in considering how technology shifts us, publishing latitude and longitude co-ordinates of images in Ramallah, taken not for their image but their GPS data; asking about the technical, moral and political lives of counter-images, of not wanting to pin-drop images on social networks because of the violent boundaries of their abstract location.

The text looks to positively negate the superstitious manner in which we perceive art, focusing on moral aspects, asking, for example, if/ how can we deface photographs taken by Palestinian refugee children in Lebanon. It also looks at Jewish writers such as Kafka, Arnold Zweig and Jacob Israel de Haan, examining where their motives have been misappropriated by nationalist pretexts of the emerging state of Israel; where Kafka has been adopted against his non-existent will and De Haan, widely believed to be the victim of Israel’s first political assassination.

The work has been made with the kind support of Delfina Foundation, Art School Palestine and the British Council.