Why have you chosen to mash up aspects of pop culture? Working with pop culture is a part of viewing my environment in a critical way. My work recycles material. Doing that with a non-critical view would be wrong. You've used the word ‘mash’; and ‘mash-up’ is one of the sickest, cheapest things you can find, ‘mash-up culture’; taking a bad tune, adding another bad tune and creating a third bad tune, and I'm not doing that. I'm trying to take bad sounds and create something better with them, or at least create a critical view of them. If I use newsreels I will not just use all kinds of slaughtering scenes because it's fun to show blood. I try to be critical about what we see in the media and show it to the audience in order to raise questions, not to give answers.

If you are an artist and you're painting moustaches on faces of models in magazines, it has to be the right moustache and the right model in order to be powerful. So this is what I try to do, present the media as we know it from a different perspective.

I like to catch people from a bit of a different angle. There's a piece I did with John Travolta, which I called ‘Fever’. John Travolta is Tony Manero [in Saturday Night Fever] and he's waking up in the morning and he's fixing himself in his underwear, and when you play with it in the right way you just can't believe that this was put on screen. Extending a certain sequence can show you something totally different. Extending Elvis shouting — you know I use one of his last shouts in the piece? — extending this shout gives it a very interesting, touching element. On the other hand I'm trying to make people aware that these celebrities are just people and they became celebrities by this machinery that was put in place for them. I like to play with what people did to them, with the image of this person, not the actual person. Their agony.

Why did you call the project Sniper? When we opened our studio we opened the doors to the public. The idea was to create an atmosphere. People like to go to a place that's owned by an ex-wise guy, an ex-pimp, an ex-this, an ex-that. Why not have a place that's owned by an ex-killer, an authorised, government killer? One that’s retired and misses the 'good old days' when the colonies were still in existence and the borders were clear between good and bad; one who misses Southeast Asia and Chinese beer, Mekhong whiskey, chansons and ethnic music. That was the beginning of this place. It's a post-colonial, melancholic mood, that's what we call it.

Do you have a day job? I don't have a day job, I just have night jobs. I perform as a VJ accompanying DJs and for events. And I DJ almost weekly, an eclectic mix of music.

What do you have coming up? We're working on a big project in October. It's a theatre thing in a city in north Israel. You know I come from Israel? There's a theatre festival every October and we're trying to do a video performance together with an Arab classical performance.

If you want to see some of my political work, I once built three huge rocking horses [for a piece called My Little Pony] and you can sit on them and watch videos cut up at MTV-style speed, images of child abuse, not necessarily just sexual abuse, but more political abuse, social abuse of children. Art galleries are not interested in showing this work because it's just too political and not opposed to saying, “I'm political.” WMO

More info on where you can see/hear Sniper

http://www.sniperberlin.com/

Interview © 2009 Wheel Me Out. No part can be used for any purpose without prior consent. Please contact editorial@wheelmeout.com

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