English
Deutsch
until 26.10. | #4447ARTatBerlin | carlier | gebauer show from 13. September 2024 the exhibition Not knowing is a good place to start of the artist Dor Guez.
Dor Guez Munayer’s works deal with traces and scars. By interrogating personal experiences and memories alongside official narratives of the past, he raises questions about the role of contemporary art in telling unwritten histories and recontextualising visual and written archives. Guez’s solo exhibition Not knowing is a good place to start uses archival material from public and private sources to uncover the multiple facets between first-hand accounts and dominant cultural narratives. Guez was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian mother and father from a family of Arab-Jewish immigrants from North Africa. The exhibition emphasises the artist’s interest in German history and his ongoing engagement with the history of his family and his communities in Jaffa, Lydda, Jerusalem and Gaza. The exhibition was put together last year, during which the artist and his family experienced an unprecedented war in their homeland.
Guez’s ongoing photographic series of suitcases of immigrants and refugees refers to the exile of his father’s (Guez) family from Tunisia after the Nazi occupation and the expulsion of his mother’s (al Munayer) family, whose property was nationalised during the 1948 war, while they hid in the basement of St George’s Church in Lydda. Guez unfolds the ‘afterlife’ of these objects, which have been passed down through generations. He photographs the six outer sides of each suitcase he selects and then combines them into one surface, a flattened perspective, so that the volume of the object, what it can potentially contain, unfolds into a single point of view. What do people take with them when they are forced to leave their homes? Every detail of the final photographic image explores the physical traces of time – scars from the journey to the destination. The exhibition presents Suitcase No.2 and Suitcase No.3.
The loss of Guez’s family home in Lydda (1948) resonates in the present, as members of his family in Gaza once again sought refuge in a church after their homes were destroyed. When food was scarce, Guez’s relatives relied on nature for sustenance, harvesting a local wild plant called khobiza. This plant, which is associated with Palestinian cuisine, grows in fields, abandoned places and home gardens. Khobiza (from the Arabic word for bread) was used in the past as a substitute for bread during wars, droughts and sieges. Guez’s khobiza series, which is part of a larger body of work, shows various parts of the plant after harvesting, which appear to sink into or float out of the photographic paper.
The sculpture Nest was created last summer. Pigeons entered his studio in Jaffa during Guez’s absence and were looking for a place to nest. They flew in through a window left open and searched for a suitable place, a protected and sheltered spot for their chicks. The favoured spot was always the high bookshelf in the artist’s library, on top of a Hebrew and Aramaic Bible dictionary from 1977.
The exhibition includes a series of works that were previously shown as part of Guez’s solo museum exhibition Amid Imperial Grids (2023) at the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, Osnabrück. In Guez’s print series Amid Imperial Grids, the artist has manipulated topographical maps of zones connecting Germany to various nations, all dating from the turn of the 20th century. By removing almost all human traces – names of cities, towns and national borders – and filling in the gaps in the ‘missing’ visual information, Guez has created a raw topography stripped of geopolitical prescriptions and human constructions. He then altered these landscapes by transforming them into negative images. The results are abstractions stripped of everything that defines them politically and historically, bringing the maps closer to what feels like a human body.
Vernissage: Friday, 13 September 2024, 6 – 10 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 13 September until Saturday, 26 October 2024
To the Gallery
Caption title: Dor Guez, Not knowing is a good place to start, exhibition view at carlier | gebauer, Berlin, 2024
Photo © Andrea Rossetti
Exhibition Dor Guez – carlier | gebauer | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
