Nation for Two
[Short film]
2K stop-motion-animation & Film
Duration : 15:15
France, Spain, Israel, the Netherlands
2008-2012
A man and a woman dig their underground way towards each other from two remote locations in the world, whilst leaving physical threads wherever they pass. The wandering quest travels through a wide collage of landscapes in nature, war zones, cities and industrial areas.
‘Nation for Two’ portrays in a surreal manner the idea that love knows neither nationality nor geographical boundaries. Under the ground there are neither borders nor entry permit required, under the ground the body becomes part of the landscape and the landscape is a body of desires.
Chaja Hertog and Nir Nadler are an artist duo as well as married couple, and together they have created an intimate and beautiful body of work around the otherness of another body. We are, after all, social animals who seek companionship and community. However, no matter how hard we try, we are ultimately always separate bodies, separate entities. Hertog and Nadler explore this principle of inseparable separateness and the search for intimacy with the other in a variety of pieces ranging from performance, still images and video.
BIO
Chaja Hertog (1978) and Nir Nadler (1977) are a Dutch-Israeli artist-duo based in Amsterdam. Their collaborative work spans the spectrum time-based disciplines from performance and spatial installation, to photography and film. The departure point for most of their work is the body, with its physicality, its violence, its intimacy, its identity, and the changes it undergoes through the passage of time. Abstract in terms of storytelling and expressive in terms of imagery, the duo’s work takes on a journey into imaginary worlds while challenging their audience’s perception of what is seen and imagined.
After both graduated from the the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 2006, Hertog then received her M.F.A in 2011 from the ArtScience department at Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, whereas Nadler graduated in 2012 from DasArts, Master of Theater, in Amsterdam. Apart from their partnership in art practice, Hertog and Nadler are also partners in life.
www.hertognadler.com