Sojourn– The Katamonim, a solo exhibition, The New Gallery Teddy, Jerusalem 2024, curator: Tamar Gispan-Greenberg
 
Over the past decade, I have been photographing the Israeli public space. The desire to get to know the society in which I live and better understand how the public space reflects it led me to initiate “Sojourn”: An ongoing independent residency project, which started in December 2015 and has no end date. As part of this platform, three times a year I travel to a place I have not been to, for a week. I find a contact that helps me get a modest place to stay and connects me with some local social activists. I schedule meetings with them over the first three days of my stay, learn about the place and write a diary with quotes from these conversations. The rest of the time – I take pictures.

The goal is to stay at all types of communities, from all sectors. So far, I have stayed in sixteen townships: Arad, Kibbutz Bar’am, Ma’alot-Tarshiha, Mitzpe Ramon, Isfiya, Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Old Acre, Moshav Ma’ale Gamla, Shefar-Am, Moshav Timorim, Kfar Tavor, Eilat, Kibbutz Kfar Aaza, Metula, Efrat, and Jerusalem’s Katamonim neighborhood.

In 2020, I created an updating digital library on my website. Each residency has its own book, featuring quotes from my conversations with the local people I have met and my photographs. The quotes are an inseparable part of working on each residency. They are the voice of the local residents and serve as the documentary aspect of the piece. Its objective is to foreground the complexity of Israeli society, while the photos are my own personal impression of the place. It is the combination of the two that makes the whole.

In May 2003, I stayed in the Katamon neighborhood in Jerusalem. The visual and textual materials are presented in this solo exhibition at Teddy Gallery, a walking distance away from the neighborhood.

This is the first time I present materials from the “Sojourn” project as an exhibition in a physical display space.