Natalia Zourabova “Behind the yellow gates” 2008

Could you imagine that someone stopped the world movement and there are just several machinery creatures still continue moving? The story, named “Behind The Yellow Gates” or “The Yellow Gates” is about this.

 The life is almost frozen, nothing is moving, except of defective twitched movement of an automatic iron gate, which leads into a village and a saw in a carpenter’s hand. This is another world, where life passes with different tenseness.

 Dissonant motives follow one after another, frontier checkpoint is described as a mystic tower, a village became a mystery, stumped crashed garden is although killed by meaning but never can be dead- it is still full of mysterious power. The author invests objects with another life.

 Story begins in a middle of nowhere, at night time in a desert, and a person who leads the way will never be shown during the whole story. People in generally are not presented here with full bodies, only parts of them we can notice. People are lost; they are abandoned in another dimension. People here are not important, they are observed with equal attention as trees. We see a room, we notice only legs of lying people (no one knows whether those people are sleeping or dead), but we entirely examine a wardrobe which is opened and turned inside-down.

 The story ends with a flight above the village (flight of a bird? flight of a mysterious eye?) which leads back to nowhere, persuaded by an endless wish to find traces of life, like that search , Search For The Golden Dreydl by Naftule's Dream, which supplies the story as a music.

Natalia Zourabova, “Walking Ramot”, 2005

Like it happen on music lesions with Bach suites (“French suites” by Bach are following a story), when students play them again and again on a piano during a lesson - these monotone repetitions make students mad,  like this the story of walking through Ramot (a district in the city Beer Sheva) shows the progressive madness of the environment.

The event springs from the very routine, evening walk. Like in the film by Gus Van Sant  “Gerry” The Walk became an Absurd: a wild dog’s attack occurs, procession leaves a city and continues the trip in a stone canyon, passes by a crashed burnt skeleton of a car, and in the end people with a small child and a baby carriage completely disappear in a desert at night.

 The story is shown in still pictures. Like those pictures that appear in a memory long after an event, the only still pictures, which lead us from a place to place are remain after the journey.