Along The Break
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Dates2013 - Ongoing
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Author
- Location Israel, Israel
“man is but the imprint of his native landscape”
(Shaul Tchernichovsky)
I was always taken by the idea of the American Road trip, the endless road and vast open spaces. This body of work is an attempt to import this notion into the Israeli restricted territory, an ironic attempt of a journey in search of the intersections between geography, history and biography in the land of contradictions I used to call home.
The Great Rift Valley or the “Syrian - African BREAK” in Hebrew, is a continuous geographic trench caused 35 million years ago by movement of tectonic plates. This topographic phenomenon which crosses contemporary Israel is carving out the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea and the Red Sea and shapes the physical borders of Israel; with Lebanon and Syria in the north, with Jordan along the eastern front and with Egypt in the south. Route 90 is the longest single road in Israel (470km) and it follows the valley floor of the ‘Break’ from north to south, border to border.
Although the break describes the physical features of the phenomenon, I use it as a platform for my conceptual journey, confronting the break as a metaphor to my sentiment towards my native landscape.
Using a large format camera, I transform the relics into monuments, creating a multi layered photographic perspective; pictorial, poetic and laced with empathy on one hand, yet tinged with irony and underlying ideological tones on the other. Ambiguity runs through the works and sews them together in this ongoing dialogue between the ordinary and the sublime.
Although not visible in any of the images, the main protagonists are the humans whose ideology, religion, and political values have had a transformative impact on the conflicted landscape.