Orit Ishay's comprehensive show at the Prague City Gallery includes images of bomb shelters, military uniforms, mourning rituals, woman soldiers, and a scrapbook of local dried flowers that had been given to General Allenby. It seems that the entirety of activities Ishay engages in creates an interesting critical course in which information loses its content and reality sheds its substance.
“The work of the photojournalists’ collective Activestills does not settle for reflecting the grim reality by providing representations of it, but offers a more active mode of photography that joins the protests of the struggling communities being photographed.” Nadeem Karkabi reviews the recently published book that covers a decade of Activestills’ collective photo-activism.
Do the works of Michal Makaresco represent cheap fetishism and dubious situations? Were they made casually, easily, or on a whim? Hagai Ulrich visited the show at Hamidrasha Gallery in Tel Aviv and came back with thoughts about good taste, honesty, as well as questions about weight and scale.
Between 1918 and 1924, the German missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde traveled to Tierra del Fuego and West Patagonia, the southernmost point in Chile and therefore the globe. Alma Mikulinsky writes about the traveling exhibition of Gusinde’s photographs, documenting his encounter with the indigenous people of the Selk’nam, the Yamanas and the Kawésquar.
The third and final part of the essay by Noah Simblist focuses on Akram Zaatari’s use of dialogical exchange as an artistic strategy. While completely different in their dynamics and outcomes, Zaatari’s conversations with both Hagai Tamir and Avi Mograbi, he argues, reveal different degrees of both personal and political engagement and, at the same time, various forms of antagonism and refusal.
Many emotionally and politically charged places appear in Nir Evron's work, among them Rawabi, the new Palestinian city, the Seven Arches Hotel on Mount Olive, in Jerusalem, and the Jamestown Settlement in Virginia, USA. What happens to the concreteness of the locations and the specific political stories when the works separate content and form? Hagai Ulrich reviews Evron's show, "Masad (Foundation)."
