Popaganda

Anat Ben-David is best described as a pop video
performance artist. Originally trained as a visual and performance artist, she
has developed from first introducing pop to performance, to later introducing
performance (and video art) to pop.

Her long term project Popaganda comes in
multiple shapes, as video installation, as music c.d., or as live performance,
featuring Anat as a one woman electro-band framed by her intriguing and award
winning videos.
Popaganda deals with the modernist notion of the totality of the solo artist
and the symbolic and iconic aesthetics of a propaganda song. "Pop and
Propaganda are linked as a way of communicating to a vast audience visual,
verbal and performed visions of power. In pop like in propaganda flyers with
symbols will try to call people to join in and become fans of an idea or a
trend channelled through a person - the visionary or the pop star. The leader,
like the pop star, will be printed on posters and in the hearts of his/hers
fans. In Popaganda I tried to use some of these ideas and become in my act that
iconic persona."

Anat gives a contemporary electro pop treatment to classic
World War II era songs, ranging from Marlene Dietrich to Brecht/Weill. On stage
and on screen she appears in various versions of herself, varying from a
multiplied dominatrix Marlene Dietrich to an immaculate angel floating through
an empty virtual space. Popaganda Voices from Hell Gold Version, one of the
seven digital Popaganda videos, which won the Goldsmith Art Purchase Prize in
2003, displays Anat as a Nazi girl chorus, performing her own re-mix of a Marlene
Dietrich hit and an early Israeli song. While her videos are sometimes playful,
often disturbing, always intriguing, her live appearance ranges from the
atonality of Velvet Underground's Nico to a pissed female pub karaoke performer
to a post punk cabaret diva. Be prepared!
Bettina Knaup

Organisation: City of Women
In collaboration with: Zavod Bunker - Stara
elektrarna and Cankarjev dom