Artists' Takeover: Dor Guez, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane free admission

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Artists' Takeover: Dor Guez

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Artists' Takeover: Dor Guez

Last Christmas, my husband and I moved to an old house in Ajami (Jaffa), the neighborhood where my grandmother grew up before 1948. The decision to move was impulsive. A week after the move, I went over some photographs from my archive that I hadn't looked at for a decade. Among them, I found this image from the late 30s. My grandmother, now 87, appears at the center, with her classmates. At second glance, everything seemed very familiar. The house in front of which she was photographed was a private school for girls and is actually the house I live in today. She stands just below my bedroom.

My archive contains a number of photographs of my grandmother and her eight classmates in Jaffa from the 1930s. This diptych shows a mirror images of the girls in two groups. In the background, you can identify Ajami’s houses sitting on a hill above the Mediterranean. We hung the diptych above our kitchen sink.

When conflict began on the border of Tel Aviv and Jaffa in 1948, my grandmother's family packed a few items, locked the door of their home and moved in with relatives in Lydda. According to the UN Partition Plan for Palestine, Lydda was to be defined as a protected international zone and my family thought they were leaving their home in Jaffa for a few days only. They could not return. A year after the war ended, my grandparents got married. This union was the first wedding in Lydda after the war. I found this photograph in a box under their bed, torn and wrinkled. The bride's veil is replaced with torn photographic paper. This photograph marks the starting point for creating my ongoing archive and was placed in the heart of our home.

On the way to the beach from our home in Jaffa, I often pass the ruins of what once was my Grandmother’s home that was demolished a few years ago. I collected a few pieces of the tiled floor and placed them on the floor of my studio.

Before Their Diaspora was a gift from my grandmother. Through archival photography, this book is crucial in depictions of Palestine pre-1948. One of the images looks very familiar…

In the past 20 years I have been working with different local archives. Recently I started connecting them via performative lectures which reflect on the relationship between language and displacement, and the entanglement of nature with perceptions of home and identity. The performances are a result of my most recent work in collaboration with the American Colony Archive in Jerusalem.

Lilies of the Field

My series of photographs Lilies of the Field is comprised of luminous pressed floral and plant arrangements I discovered in my research at the archive. The flowers highlighted in the project represent a diversity of flora indigenous to the holy land, and the areas surrounding the Old City. An examination of the color hues in the flower arrangements shows variations in both the durability and frequency of Yellow pigments. Tracing the remnants of this pigment, I photographed the front side of each flower arrangement, then of the backside of its overlaying sheet which, over a period of some 100 years, had absorbed most of carotenoid pigment. Neatly aligning both images – that of the flowers, ostensibly the series’ subject matter, with that of the pigmented protective layer– it re-conceptualizes the image with respect to the time dimension. With attention given predominantly to the pigment shed by the flowers rather than to the flowers themselves, the work undermines the hierarchy between what is perceived as authentic, as opposed to fabricated.

About the Artist

Dor Guez was born in Jerusalem to a Christian-Palestinian family on his mother’s side and a family of Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s. He lives and works in Jaffa. Guez produces photography and video installations that explore the relationship between art, narrative, and memory, interrogating personal and official accounts of the past. Guez is among the leading critical and artistic voices of the Middle East whose practice raises questions about contemporary art’s role in narrating unwritten histories and re-contextualizing visual and written documents.

To date, eight catalogs have been published internationally about Guez's practice. Publishers include Distanz, New England Press, and A.M Qattan Foundation. Guez's work has been displayed in over thirty-five solo exhibitions worldwide and participated in numerous group exhibitions.

Dor Guez will be in conversation with Sara Reisman, Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation, New York on Wednesday 2nd December at 4pm. This conversation will explore themes arising from Dor Guez’s work currently on view in Worlds Without End: Worlds Without End, as well as the artist’s recent solo exhibition Vera Icona, at the Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague which brought together the Jerusalem born artist’s most recent photographic series Lilies of the Field (2019) with a trilogy of three experimental, narrative videos produced between 2009 and 2011, that collectively reflect on the relationship between language and displacement and nature’s entanglement with perceptions of home and identity.

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