Can you describe the concept of your performance?

In Occupation I, II we see a video on a monitor of the rabbit laying on a bed, a hand inserting something inside him/her... the rabbit becomes ill... after that four flags come out of him/her, the flags are saying West, the rabbit is infected, invaded by the West. The West had penetrated inside him, it is invisible, but it is inside.

At the same time there is a live performance where the rabbit masturbates looking at various images; military occupation, porn, shopping cata-logue and medical images. S/he filma the images which are pro-jected on a wall, so the audience can see what the rabbit is looking at while masturbating. Is the rabbit turned on by these images? Is s/he bored with it? Is it healing her/himself with masturbation?

Why do you use autoerotic practice in your performance?

I use masturbation because it’s such a private act made public. I wanted to express the feeling that any type of “occupation” or invasion works very much on this border between the private and the public. Masturbation is also interesting because the fantasies or visual material people are using come from a mass-produced cul-ture of images and ideas that we all share one way or another. For example the “Nazi porn” I’m using in the performance indicates that the Third Reich, the concentration camps and the holocaust have all penetrated our mass-consciousness and are used in various ways, one of them beeing pornography.

Is your hour-long masturbation also an invasion on the body?

I don’t actually feel like I’m invading my body during this hour, I am sort of mechanically pleasing it. But I do feel that I am invading my psyche with the images. The audience might feel invaded by the images and by the exposure to a private act. Or maybe not. What is the relationship of the invasion of the body, which you use in your performance, and invasion used in medical practice?

Any kind of medical care that involves penetrating the skin, the ori-fices, opening the body up etc., leaves one feeling invaded and out of control. Even if it is “good for you”, you are still invaded.

The rabbit has a flat chest and a vagina — does this perfor-mance deal with transsexual topics?

I think all my work deals with gender, and particularly gender flu-idity. The rabbit has a femaleness and maleness to him, and s/he is masculine and feminine at the same time. It is important for me to express that everything has both or all inside it. Nothing is just one thing or the other.

What is the relationship of the rabbit and the images on the screens?

The rabbit masturbates to the projected images. On one monitor we see the rabbit (which might be another rabbit, or the rabbit on another day) being penetrated by the West. On another monitor I show a film from the 1980s made by the film maker Sandra Lahire called Edge, which is like an abstracted collage of looking at the body from inside and outside and medical images, blood etc.

Why are you shooting the performance with a camera, what is the importance of the double image?

The importance is that people can see what I’m looking at on a large scale. I am also making a comparison between real life and the media or visual cultural. I am talking about visual representation… about what “really happens”… and how we represent it in images, in the media, in art etc. We are so completely desensitized to images we see. This is why the masturbation is a bit mechanical, the rabbit is very used to the images, and we are so used to see the most horrific images on screen, on television. Can it still touch us? Can images still touch us? The “double image” also has to do with scale — I look very small compared to the projection, but when I film myself I become large.

What is the context of your performance? 

The specific context is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. As an Israeli I feel this is a public and private invasion, which penetrates and poisons all of us. It is internalized and invisible inside us, but we all acting it out. The same could be said of the holocaust.

In what way is your personal life connected to your art?