EVENT: ALONA RODEH (NOVEMBER 21—DECEMBER 4 2025)
CORE DUMP
4K digital video, color, sound, 6’ 06”, Israel/Germany
created by Alona Rodeh
November 21–December 4 2025
CORE DUMP is a born-digital CGI short that depicts a surreal swarm of drones scavenging for e-waste. Its title borrows from computing, where a “core dump” is the recorded state of a machine at the moment of system failure. The work unfolds in a simulated post-industrial dump, rendered in a game engine, where an open landfill of discarded appliances becomes both stage and subject. Drawing on the speculative frameworks of climate fiction, the film addresses the geopolitics of waste: the circulation of discarded electronics from Europe and the US to Asia and Africa and the illegal smuggling of e-waste from Israel to the Palestinian Territories in the West Bank, the persistence of toxic open dumps, and the ecological violence inflicted on human and non-human life. While rooted in environmental critique, CORE DUMPalso contemplates 21st-century warfare and the entanglement of ecological and geopolitical conditions. The drones’ relentless patrols allude to militarized logistics, siege economies, and the erasure of cultural heritage in conflict zones.
Alona Rodeh (b. 1979, Israel) is a Berlin-based artist whose practice spans installation, video, sound, and digital environments. She studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where she earned a BFA (2000–2004) and later an MFA in Tel Aviv (2008–09), with additional Erasmus exchanges at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunst, Vienna (2002) and the Royal College of Art, London (2008). Rodeh has developed a research-driven approach that examines how infrastructures (street lighting, alarms, safety devices) shape collective experience in contemporary cities. Her early immersive works, including Above and Beyond (2013) and the Safe and Sound series (2014–18), investigated the aesthetics of security culture, combining scenographic strategies with critical inquiry into visibility, control, and urban anxiety. In recent years, Rodeh has turned to simulation technologies, game engines, and video games (Wasted, 2024, Token Eater, 2024) to extend this research into digital space. Her ongoing series CITY DUMMIES (2022–) employs Unreal Engine to construct hyper-real, machine-inhabited cityscapes that are at once seductive and dystopian. Shown at Ars Electronica (Linz), the Center for Digital Art (Holon), Rosenfeld Gallery (Tel Aviv), Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen Germany, Loop Art Fair Barcelona and other festivals and screenings, the works probe the political and ecological implications of automation, post-industrial decay, and algorithmic governance. Rodeh positions herself as an observer and entertainer, staging immersive environments that invite reflection on the entanglement of technology, spectacle, and authority.