The video work Bouncing Ball shows a polarized world forged by just two actions – hitting the ball and escaping from it. On manicured lawns, a row of figures are seen being subjected to relentless attack from a single game ball, or running from it. The ball offers the central viewpoint of the work and is its plot generator. The video presents an imaginary world populated by characters that are fantastic, colourful, and humorous but also vulnerable. Their role is defined by their shape, attire, and attributes. Their limitations and narrow worldview, too, serve their destiny in the world. As in mythological plots or in superhero depictions, the imprint and characterization of the figures are deterministic, depending on their intended role in the great scheme of things.
The work traces a reality of instrumental existence, as though it were a nature documentary, and reveals a fixed "food chain" in which the strong survive and the weak bear the brunt. The relationships between the characters play out around actions that are essentially similar to ball games. Closer inspection reveals the predetermined rules and roles, the unequal power relationships that have been established between the actors, and how each figure’s pleasure is a relishing of the pain it inflicts on another. The hierarchical relationships at work attest to the joint fate of the characters of Meroz’s fictional universe: all, without exception, are denied the chance of ever escaping the predestined outcome. It is a world devoid of personal choice, in which the future is preordained. Every character complies with the social role chosen for them in a social system that subordinates them to its laws and controls them, without the ability or desire to appeal.
The work Bouncing Ball draws inspiration from many visual and textual sources, from the classical era to contemporary popular culture: depictions, mythologies, figures from the repertoire of commedia dell’arte and the Bauhaus theatre, folk dance movements and gestures, and so forth. Meroz interweaves in her work principles from theological doctrines and political ideologies of totalitarian regimes, to create a world of fantasy that operates according to an internal logic. The video suggests a disillusionment and disappointment with ideologies of the past and presents a naïve childlike aesthetic that masks the reality of a brutal struggle for survival. Echoing the collapse of the utopian dream, it casts doubts on the feasibility of the existence of a humanist society that upholds values of equality and peace.
