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WHAT ISN'T THERE
exhibition/press
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This new photo-installation, “What Isn’t There”, was constructed over a period of fifteen years (1992 – 2007), and is an ongoing project documenting the absent presence of Palestinian villages destroyed by the Israeli Occupation. The 35mm panoramic photographs, which depict rural landscapes, abandoned structures and visages typical of Israeli tourist sites, interpret the qualities of loss and mourning while playing upon the process of discovery inherent to documentary photography. As in my previous works, presence is always haunted by absence: the images reveal traces of intimate domestic life—planted vegetation, rocks strewn in shapes resembling the foundations of a home, an errant footpath leading off into the horizon—yet what is visible obscures the larger history of what isn’t there; the Palestinian settlements that once occupied these locations.
The works in this exhibit draw upon the tradition of classical landscape composition yet challenge the notion of the photographic document as a static representation. There is a presence caught within these frames that exceeds the tangible: these are landscapes of desire, longing, loss, mourning, pleasure and the possibility of reparation offering an architecture of absence that exceeds the melancholic repetition of traumatic loss.
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