Assistant: Mati Elmaliah
Supported by Mifal Hapais Arts and Culture Council.
The exhibition concludes a long process in which Shalom photographed, collected, and documented the distant and evolving history of the Jessy Cohen Neighborhood’s residents. In Dafna Shalom’s hands, current portrait photographs, pictures from family albums, and conversations with residents have become an archive documenting the story of the neighborhood and its residents.
A large proportion of artist Dafna Shalom’s work engages in the politics of identity and the rupture between tradition and modernity, and for the present project she opened a temporary photography studio in the neighborhood’s commercial center. The exhibition comprises current portrait photographs of the residents taken in the studio, alongside video clips of residents in their homes, looking through family photo albums, revealing old photographs taken in Holon, Greece, Morocco, Russia, and various other countries, and conversations with them that accord these photographs a personal and historical context. The studio operated for a year and became a lively and dynamic intergenerational intersection in which historical photographs were scanned and new ones taken.
In this exhibition Dafna Shalom conducts a dialogue with a long universal tradition of social photography and examines it from local and contemporary perspectives. The body of work in the exhibition was created by opening the photographic practice to discussion, making the act of documenting and directing participatory. The work on creating an archive of the Jessy Cohen Neighborhood included joint processing of emotional, intellectual, and community content, exposing the neighborhood’s residents to the art of photography, and a debate on processes of representation, stereotyping, multiple identities, immigration waves in different periods, and processes of historical erasure that were part of Israel’s melting pot policies. The exhibition materials will continue to function as an evolving archive that will be accessible to the public after the exhibition closes.
Jessy Cohen is one of many neighborhoods possessing a stigma on the one hand, and lacking historical representation on the other. Most of the neighborhood’s residents are immigrants who came to Israel in various immigration waves from the Arab States, the former Soviet Union, and Ethiopia. In the main, the residents’ background and the story of their arrival in the neighborhood do not gain attention, and are even silenced. The exhibition provides a platform for the neighborhood’s representation not from an external perspective, but as the outcome of encounters and conversations between the artist and the residents, thus blurring the classic roles of artist/photographer, photographed subject and viewer.
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
