
Border Control Exhibition Artist Highlights: Rick Silva & Nadav Assor
Rick Silva was born in 1977 in Brazil and lives in Eugene, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor of Art & Technology at the University of Oregon. He received an MFA from The University of Colorado in 2007, and has since shown extensively nationally and internationally, with solo exhibitions at Transfer Gallery in New York, Wil Aballe Art Projects in Vancouver, New Shelter Plan in Copenhagen, and Interstitial Gallery in Seattle. Silva’s projects and collaborations have been featured in festivals such as Sonar in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, and Resonate in Belgrade. His works and installations have been acquired by multiple permanent collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Borusan Contemporary Collection, and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University. WIRED magazine called Silva’s videos “glitchy, curious things; some mesmerizing, some arresting.”



Nadav Assor works in a range of audiovisual and tangible media to explore unstable notions of bodies, identities and social interaction as transformed by mediation technologies. He is interested in the hyper-mediated body and its place in intimate, social, and political systems. His work is often realized via lo-fi reenactments of appropriated military-industrial technologies, from eye-tracking to drone surveillance, from street mapping to medical and security screenings. Assor has performed and exhibited internationally in festivals, music venues, museums and galleries. Some recent venues for his work include Transmediale Festival Berlin, Oberhausen Film Festival, Video Vortex XI / Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India, Hong-Gah Museum Taipei, Centre Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Fridman Gallery NYC, Edith-Russ-Haus Oldenburg, the European Media Arts Festival, the Soundwave Biennial in San Francisco, Residency Unlimited NYC, Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the Koffler Center in Toronto, Julie M Gallery Tel Aviv, and many others.
Ground Effect is an investigation of the constantly shifting, 80 km long line in Israel under which rainfall amounts to less than 200mm a year on average. This line, which aligns with the global desert belt, cuts from the east, near the West Bank, to the west, near the Gaza strip. It is where I grew up, an area divided between industrial scale agriculture, nature preserves, ancient and recent ruins, Bedouin towns, encampments and olive groves, artificial pine forests planted on contested lands, rural Jewish communities, and military practice zones. This area has been fittingly called “The Conflict Shoreline” by architect Eyal Weizman in his recent book of the same name. Ground Effect was commissioned as part of the project- “Agropolis- artistic interventions in a scientific exhibition” (curator: Maayan Sheleff), at the Bloomfield Science Museum, Jerusalem, Israel.

