Change of Guards: Thoughts about Iddo Markus’s “Parade”

Dr. Shahar Marnin-Distelfeld 

The year is 2019. A Haifa–based artist finds a discarded box of photo-slides taken by someone back in the 60's. It is a pile of images with no connection whatsoever to its finder. These photos smell of someone else and of strangeness belonging to something from a different place. One photo captures his glance. Within it, the artist is attracted to some stains of black and red. A ceremonial parade of the Queen’s Guard, framed by lines of watching tourists. A spectacle which has been taking place for hundreds of years. A fancy ritual embedded in a centuries-long tradition.

What do these elegant, British Queen’s Guard soldiers, depicted in a 1968 faded slide have to do with him? The Haifa-based artist was brought up in an Isreali context, where soldiers wear khaki uniforms and are usually tired, smelly and filled with belligerent masculinity.

Markus dived into an artistic realm represented in this old photo and got caught in it.  His indeveres resulted in a multi-layer project: the “Parade” - A spatial installation, concoct through two years of artistic research and creation involving various media: photography, painting, monotype, relief and sculpture. While relating to digitextual theories, Markus explores the tension between the individual iconic image and its replicas, the tension between the formalistic minimalism of a single soldier’s image and that of the density and multitude of a full-scale army.