Anat Ben-David is best described as a pop video performance artist. Originally trained as a visual and performance artist, she has developed from first introducing pop to performance, to later introducing performance (and video art) to pop.
Her long term project Popaganda comes in multiple shapes, as video installation, as music c.d., or as live performance, featuring Anat as a one woman electro-band framed by her intriguing and award winning videos.
Popaganda deals with the modernist notion of the totality of the solo artist and the symbolic and iconic aesthetics of a propaganda song. "Pop and Propaganda are linked as a way of communicating to a vast audience visual, verbal and performed visions of power. In pop like in propaganda flyers with symbols will try to call people to join in and become fans of an idea or a trend channelled through a person - the visionary or the pop star. The leader, like the pop star, will be printed on posters and in the hearts of his/hers fans. In Popaganda I tried to use some of these ideas and become in my act that iconic persona."
Anat gives a contemporary electro pop treatment to classic World War II era songs, ranging from Marlene Dietrich to Brecht/Weill. On stage and on screen she appears in various versions of herself, varying from a multiplied dominatrix Marlene Dietrich to an immaculate angel floating through an empty virtual space. Popaganda Voices from Hell Gold Version, one of the seven digital Popaganda videos, which won the Goldsmith Art Purchase Prize in 2003, displays Anat as a Nazi girl chorus, performing her own re-mix of a Marlene Dietrich hit and an early Israeli song. While her videos are sometimes playful, often disturbing, always intriguing, her live appearance ranges from the atonality of Velvet Underground's Nico to a pissed female pub karaoke performer to a post punk cabaret diva.
Bettina Knaup
