I'm a photographer and digital media artist whose practice examines the politics of image-making in contested geographies, particularly Israel/Palestine. I work across 3D modeling, mapping, drone photography, and archival research to examine photography's entanglements with colonial and territorial politics.
I'm an Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
The research subject in Landscape in Continuum is a portion of land that sits between Isawiya and Abu Tor in East Jerusalem; unappropriated territory at the heart of a controversy between official authorities that seek to turn it into a national park - the Jerusalem Municipality, the Nature and Parks Authority, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Environmental Protection - and activists, politicians, urban planners, and residents of the area who wish to prevent this plan from being realized. They claim that the alleged environmental justification for the ‘Mount Scopus National Park’ project in fact hinges on political agendas, which aim to limit the spreading of the surrounding Palestinian neighborhoods.
The land in question, serene and peaceful-looking, stretches down the hillside of the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, and has acquired an iconic quality since the campus’s inauguration. This is also the landscape that Pinchevsky saw every day during his studies at Bezalel. He currently seeks to follow this piece of land and understand what it means to observe it, realizing that landscape is a product of perspective and cultural structuring, and not only of architectonic plans and geographical outlines. The landscape’s repeated appearance in the photographs, maps and archive-based photo collages, creates a space of accumulative abundance, as a kind of gathering of evidence in attempts to decipher the significance of the place.
While I recognize the importance and impact of direct action against Israeli cultural institutions, I see my role in working to mobilize shame from within. I feel compelled to remain in conversation with that place and those who must reckon with it, even as each opportunity involves its own shame.
In this article, Noam Gal pays tribute to Allan Sekula’s essay “The Body and the Archive” (1986), analyzing the creative practice of two contemporary camera artists, Tomoko Sawada and Shabtai Pinchevsky, and the various social concerns their works evoke.
Can a Self-Driving Car Navigate an Apatheid Road will be screened at the Artport Artist Film Festival in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The First Trail will be exhibited as part of Counter Landscape, curated by Karmit Galili, at Magasin III in Jaffa.