Trailer for Nation for Two – TRT 15:16
‘Nation for Two’ portrays the idea that under the ground there are neither land borders nor entry permit required, and that literally – where there’s a will there’s a way,.
When we were kids there was this notion that if you would dig a straight hole into the ground you would end up in the other side of the planet. When we began working on this film project in 2008, we set two clear departure points (dessert and forest sceneries) while our final destination remained open.
The storyline follows the subterranean journey of a man and a woman, digging their way towards each other. We play the protagonists in this film and the traces they leave across the landscapes were also physically dug by us. It has been a long enduring process for us, in which we created stop-motion animation for the first time in combination with minimal, or shall we say linear, land art.
The traces left across these landscapes follow, to some extent, our parallel autobiographical journies towards each other between European and Middle-Eastern countries. In order to stay together we faced numerous bureaucratic obstacles, which essentially inspired this project with the idea that love knows neither nationality nor borders.
HERTOG NADLER — Chaja Hertog (Amsterdam 1978) & Nir Nadler (Haifa 1977) are an Amsterdam based artist duo, operating across disciplines of visual arts, performance and film. Their work explores relations between the natural and the artificial, between politics and poetics; combined with physicality, humor and the passage of time.
Apart from their partnership in art, Hertog and Nadler are also partners in life. Much like their different background, originate in Europe and the Middle East; their collaborative work is an attempt to rework two approaches into a single vision that contains some sort of contradiction.
Followed their graduation from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Hertog received her MA from the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague (ArtScience department), and Nadler received his MA in performance from DasArts, an internationally acclaimed program of the Amsterdam School of the Arts. They are fellows of Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Q21 – MuseumsQuartier Wien, and grant recipients of the Mondriaan Fund, Netherlands Film Fund and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts. Hertog Nadler have been widely exhibited in institutes such as Kassel Kunstverein, Museum Arnhem, Kunsthall Stavanger, MoCA Taipei, CSW Toruń, Eyebeam NY, Godsbanen Aarhus, Janco Dada Museum, New York Live Arts, Moscow Museum Of Modern Art, the 6th Thessaloniki and Biennale and the 5th International Çanakkale Biennial. Their short films have been screened in numerous international film festivals and earned several awards.
17 Days Video Series 
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