Uri Tzaig

(…) Tzaig makes objects, texts, videos and installations. But primarily, he works in the medium of the spectacle: he stages live events coordinating real people (professional sports players or dancers) in real performances of recognised team games. Then he changes the rules, subtly but consummately – not only disrupting the normal game, but calling into question the entire artifice of these ritualised engagements. Whether the game is football, basketball or just a boardgame for two players, Tzaig’s alterations to the conventions of playing and spectating reveal the similar motivations underlying all such competitions. He raises issues of us versus them that are perhaps not so surprising, given his experience growing up in a country that is virtually a permanent war-zone.(…)

Tzaig works on the idea of play from many angles, including a series of projects in which the ball is the subject – reconceived in different materials and hence endowed with different properties. Tzaig’s Paint Ball, composed of crushed crayons, yields its pigments randomly, defeating any attemp to color in an area within an outline. A tool for listening to your internal reality, it also offers release from other constrictions. When you use a pen, you work mostly from the hand, but because the Paint Ball is so big, you use much more shoulder-movement.(…) Both the Moon Window and the Compass Ball are explorations of the ball as figure, within the domestic realm.(…)

For Tzaig, the rules of engagement and linear demarcations of the ritualized battlefields of sport are mere social conventions, serving to focus the gaze on a single item of concern, perhaps as a comforting distraction from the multiple alternative points of view that might otherwise also have to be considered. The idea that there is one thing on which our attention should be trained is revealed as a convenient but deluded construct. In the infinite game, the outcome is no longer so straightforwardly winner-takes-all.

Unlimited Contemporary Art

Janet Abrams, Other Victories in If/Then Magazine (excerpts), p 14-16.