About history / Haim Sokol

Haim Sokol
About history
In his hew project Haim Sokol uses a lot of different techniques – installations, objects, graphics and even a book. There is a premier of his new film ‘Spartak’ as well. It is a theatrical video performance about the gladiators’ rebellion with the music from the ballet of Aram Khachaturian, but the action takes place in modern
The traces of past, which Sokol has made important in his works, are the traces left by the official history. A diversity of opinions on history appears in petty, unremarkable details - some sketches, thrown away photo albums, and, especially, plain material things from the history of the oppressed – orange vests of street cleaners and floor clothes from the ‘Spartak’ movie.
The things, in Sokol and Benjamin’s opinion, have the ability to indicate the possibility of some events – the ones calling for radical and revolutionary changes.
That’s where the possibility of a rebellion stems from, and then the floor cloth becomes the ‘Red Flag’ and the orange vests are the uniform of the rebel gladiators. The same way the belief in novelty and utopia was the foundation of the Russian avant-garde architecture. That’s why among other things Sokol includes avant-garde drafts in his palimpsests, and the rusty shields of Spartan decorate the Suprematic compositions. Benjamin compares the utopian belief in the deliverance as the result of history to the waiting of Messiah, which is the main idea of Judaism. Benjamin and Sokol are both interested in the Judaist religion in the cultural and their own private contexts (family history).