Angelika Sher | Thirteen | 27 September — 1 December 2009

EXHIBITION TAKES PLACE IN PARALLEL PROGRAMS 3 MOSCOW BIENNALE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

In one of the photographs in the series 13, a group of children is imprisoned inside a greenhouse, in the middle of a green field. The greenhouse, in horticultural practice, is the ideal growing environment, proffering protection, optimal climate conditions, and balanced nutrition. These human seedlings inside the greenhouse are not protected — they are trapped and unable to communicate with their surroundings. The protective wing becomes threatening, distancing. The subjects of the photograph do not give in easily; they envelope themselves in physical and mental defense mechanisms.

The body of work presented here reveals substantial changes in the normative relationship between the camera and its subjects. The direct and revealing nature of the standard photographic act becomes impossibly distant here. A sense of loss, of parting, shoots like an arrow from within colorful, seductive images. The scenes seem inaccessible, triggering an existential anxiety which rises from deep within the parenting experience.

Angelika Sher’s work from recent years often raises questions about growing up, sexual identity, origins, and fitting in. These are examined from the artist’s point of view as a mother of adolescents, a woman, and an immigrant, creating parallels — and overlaps — between the personal state of mind and the artistic process.

Some of the photographs in the series were made in Lithuania; those which were created in Israel are not identified as such. The children, having grown up in the Mediterranean, are transplanted to the gray, romantic landscape of Sher’s childhood. They seem to belong, to fit into the photographic sites, but the act of photographing and the choices made result in pronounced artificiality and even compulsion. The dissonance leaves the viewer uncomfortable, disturbed. Something remains unresolved.

As I delve even deeper, the dissonance is identified and located. I turn to the defining image of the whole series:

In a traditional rural space, highly alienated, a little girl stands. She is looking beyond the picture frame, as if searching for an answer elsewhere, outside the photograph. A closer examination reveals a blank stare which hints at an inner sinking. A mental plunge into the interior, away from the exterior. In another part of the photograph intertwined electrical cables creates a sense of entanglement, of a dead-end, but also of exceptional beauty. The functional object becomes sculptural, and at the same time acquires a symbolic dimension. Often the cables seem to be the clearest representation of the interior.

At a door in the back of the room, like a quote from Velasquez, a man stands with his back to the camera. He represents a parallel universe, whose colors are different and whose presence disturbs. You cannot help seeing it as another link in the chain of the photograph’s inner narrative. He is the lost father, the basic male gaze, a remembrance from the past.

The apparently irreconcilable tension reveals itself in the dialog between the human figures and the inanimate objects; between those who are being directed and photographed and those which passively lay there.

This concurrent relationship exists also in the dining room scene, where six children sit around a farm table, made of wood. Placing them in the back of the photograph, away from the camera, creates a sense of inaccessibility. Their eyes do not meet the camera, and here the effort to take them to the vanishing point is highest. As in other works mentioned earlier, here too it appears that those distanced are the most powerfully present. This might be due to the effect of the light, or some expression of baroque gestures, or to Sher’s inability to really part from those so close to her. Again, the objects — the shopping bags and the kitchen towel — stand basking in their trivial glory, becoming unassuming signifiers and, more than anything, move me and feed the sense of anxiety.

The camera, then, assumes a new role. It defines a territory and marks the limits of the intervention. The gaze is the mechanism of inaccessibility. Here photography appears in one of its most frustrating and fascinating instances — its inherent attempt to document the moment, the thing as it is being rendered in the past — points to its impossibility. The significant moment is the moment of failure in which there is nothing but the huge gap, created by the camera in its physical and mental presence, between the subject taking the picture and the photographed object.

The exhibition is organized with the support of the Embassy of Israel