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Locked Up

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Performance, Body art, Theater and Activism.
The Project deals with the labour of memory of the holocaust and its praxis within the collective Israeli's psyche of our present time.
At 02.06.2017 the Artist entered ‘The Foundation for Holocaust Survivors office in Israel’, and locked himself by the neck to the president’s desk. This act was intended to protest the bureaucratic maze into which the survivors are thrown while suffering neglect in times of great need for aid - as Ariel Bronz's father, a holocaust survivor, experienced firsthand.
In the following years, at each Israeli Memorial Day for the Holocaust, Ariel locked himself to central memorial monuments;

in 2017 to the ''Knesset- Menorah'' (Benno Elkan),
In 2018 to the "Monument to the Holocaust and Revival" (Igael Tumarkin),
in 2019 to the "Uprise" (Menashe Kadishman).
in 2020 to the "Monument to the Jewish Soldiers and Partisans Who Fought Against Nazi Germany" (Bernie Fink).

By doing so the artist tries to disrupt the white-wash issues and challenge the debate about the holocaust, in the public sphere and the media.

By 2020 Bronz directs - "Locked". A documentary musical. a staged reconstruction of the first time he locked himself to that office desk, as recorded on his phone.
The reality of the event is subverted by tailoring the play as a musical.
Emphasizing the extant of absurd in the official Israeli engagement with survivors. The play deals with questions of political activism when it leaves the public space and enters the theater.

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