For the first time, multidisciplinary artist Guy Bar Amotz presented his robot performance Shiroman in Hebrew in Israel. The show, written entirely before the October 7th war—except for its final part—combined dark humor with a bleak reality, inviting the audience into an extraordinary experience of sound, video, lighting, and sculpture.
The Lab transformed into an avant-garde jazz club, where three of Guy’s famous "Dickheads" took the stage: William (or Pini), Richard, and Peter — slang nicknames for the male genitals in English, each carrying satirical meaning.
The Shiroman — a new term Guy coined for his witty, short songs — explored different layers of Israeli reality, with a focus on the complex role of the artist in a local art scene that often sees him as unnecessary. The atmosphere was dimly colorful, and the powerful sound moved the audience between laughter and sorrow, deep thought and sharp critique.
Shiroman invited viewers to rethink the boundaries between human and machine, sculpture and performance, critique and self-reflection. Guy Bar Amotz held up a mirror that was at once dark, funny, and frightening, confronting us with unanswerable questions about the future of humanity, the role of art, and the meaning of memory and identity in an age of automation and lost privacy. The robots were merely a reflection of what we had become.

Photography: Guy Bar Amotz and Sharon Toval