TEL AVIV.- The audio-visual installation "Amor" (Portuguese for "love") by musician Aviad Zinemanas and video artist Dor Zlekha Levy, set out to investigate a specific emotional condition that is merely un-translatable.

Just like Germans have a word for the feeling of spiritual solitude in the forest (Waldeinsamkeit), and Czechs have coined a term to describe the agony we feel when we suddenly realize our essential misery (Litost); the Portuguese have a single word that expresses the sweet melancholy accompanying the recognition that the object of our deepest yearning will no longer return: Saudade. It is, of course, a universal experience, but the Portuguese have managed to give it a name, which has become an entire culture, a "Portuguese way of life."

Musically, Saudade began with the dozens of ships that set sail from Portugal and coincidentally "discovered" Brazil. The masses who then left their homeland for the New World left behind scores of Portuguese who lost their loved ones, a loss expressed in the Fado clubs with the mournful keening of women for the husbands who had sailed off. The musical style of Saudade is, therefore, a portmanteau created in the vast ocean between the Portuguese Fado clubs and the Brazilian Bossa nova – the sad samba. Ironically, the most famous Saudade song is one of the first Bossa nova songs ever to be recorded: Joao Gilberto's Chega de Saudade, or "no more Saudade."

Amor, now showing at the Room 25 Gallery, started as a musical work composed by Aviad Zinemanas. Zinemanas listened to dozens of songs featuring Saudade as a key motif, trying to understand it as a reduced frequency and not a particular theme. This frequency is expressed in color, pitch, and length of notes, and not in the dynamic of specific narrative development. Despite the inspiration from existing works, the tones and textures we hear express the voice of Zinemanas, his very own Saudade. Zinemanas created an audio track onto which he embedded samples from popular songs. Still, these samples went through a unique processing filter and were largely lost in the process – so that the work itself is a sort of Saudade for previous musical works. The various musical layers emerging from the speakers almost hang still in the air, keeping the auditory frequency Zinemanas tried to create. Their movement in space is gentle. There are no peaks or plummets. No catharsis. Just Saudade.

When Zinemanas played his new work for Dor Zlekha Levy, Dor wondered whether he could create a similar reconstruction of Saudade in the video. The word's universal presence in popular culture prompted Levy to search for its visual manifestations in blockbuster movies, which represent a more banal and popular perception of romantic yearning.

Everything available to Levy as digital material - meaning everything that could be sampled and processed - became raw material, out of which he extracted the frames that expressed the digital frequency he desired, moments that became objects of Saudade. By focusing on fragments of movement, expressions, and physical gestures, he presents the similarity among various objects of Saudade and exposes the structure of the shared experience. Out of the horizontal frame, he cuts a vertical view – a "story" where he slows down the several seconds he chose to cut from the source until they are dismantled from their specific identity and bleed into color and motion. The characters, taken from films shot in different countries and times, seem almost identical when devoid of their context and perspective. They float or hover as a kind of collective Saudade, as a sum of all human loss.

Amor is the second full collaboration between the two artists, whose first joint effort, "Maqamat" exhibited at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.