Tehillim is a piece of video-choreography, set to Steve Reich's 1981 masterpiece. Utilising two channels of projection, artist Tal Rosner invites us to experience an ever-changing counterpoint of call and response, and dive into its musical world––surrounded by shapes and colours, patterns and pulses.

Following grammatical structures in the Hebrew text as they're sung, through repetition to abstraction, Rosner discovers codes of belonging in speech fragments, enhancing the hypnotic power in vocal canons and minimalist vernacular. His interpretation presents us with a journey from Israel to London, exploring psychogeographic and architectural themes from his respective old and newly-found homes. 

In a sequence of playful discoveries, where each movement contains its very own microcosm of graphic rhythms and typographic explorations, Rosner conjures the interplay of positive and negative spaces, percussive and stringlike, and their logic, or form, as visual tools to access the inner world of Tehillim and his own interpretation of its emotional core. 
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Format: 2 HD channels, 30 min. 
Composer: Steve Reich. 
Video Artist: Tal Rosner.
Commissioned by the Barbican Centre, UK 2016.

With thanks to Sophie Clements, Darren Culley, Kaan Alpagut, James Egelhofer and Steve Reich.

Recording: 1982 ECM Records GmbH. 

© Installation photos: Garry Maclennan