(above: Holes, 2014, right: Dana Ariel, from Scratches, 2016)
Dana Ariel is the winner of the BPF OPEN16 solo, she was selected to exhibit at Brighton Photo Fringe 2016 from an international open call for photographers. Her exhibition Encountering Perforated Ground will feature new works from her large-scale landscape series taken in Israel and Palestine. Here she discusses the themes and processes that underpin her work with Brighton Photo Fringe Trainee Curator Jamila Prowse…
Jamila Prowse: Encountering Perforated Ground, which is being displayed at this year’s Photo Fringe, tells a story of political erasure and displacement. To what extent does your work deal with wider political narratives?
Dana Ariel: Within the series Sites of Unlearning I visit sites in Germany, the UK, and Estonia as well as Israel and Palestine. It is important for me not to remain in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in order for the work to act politically rather than be anchored in a single conflict. As part of my research I bring the different sites together, and although in the exhibition I concentrate mainly on Israel and Palestine, I also included the photo etching book Hainich forest (erased). Hainich is a forest in Germany, close to the borderline between East and West Germany. The forest was flattened to make room for military training, first by the Wehrmacht and later by the Soviets, by creating a grid of tank paths across the area. The histories of Israel and Germany are tied together, and this tie also forms my identity. But that history is not only the story of two countries; it performs as a stain spreading, contaminating, fading over time, and reappearing.
JP: For the project you visited sites in Israel and Palestine. Why did you feel it was important to represent these specific sites, and what do you hope your project communicates to the viewer?
DA: The names of the two sites, the village of Fasa’il and the settlement of Peza’el, originated from the same narrative that split in two. They contradict one another and yet, they reside side by side, both testify for past events, and embody an ongoing conflict in the present. As a site, it is not only concerned with the politics of the region, but also the political use of language, storytelling, and landscape. That, I believe, cannot be represented with a single photograph, or a simple pointing gesture. The photographic work must address the many layers and narratives that create this place, conceptually and visually.
In the exhibition Encountering Perforated Ground I attempt to loosen the ideas of what one might find there. I introduce the unexpected encounters with hospitality when fearing hostility, and the interplay of relationship between soldiers and citizens, state and play, borders and settlements. My visits to these sites are an attempt to unlearn what I am exposed to on a daily basis through the media; to see the graduated colours of the perforated ground, to encounter the contradictions that co-exist side by side, the hostility and the hospitality, and to look closely at the newly formed relationships.
It is important for me to act within a political dimension that is inseparable of life, landscape, and language. To be and to see, are my immediate methods of action.
JP: Rather then focusing on exploring this narrative through portraiture, you have documented landscapes. This approach is typical of your artistic practice. How do you navigate creating emotive work without depending heavily upon portraiture?
DA: When confronted with a portrait it is hard to escape identity, identifying, and being anchored at a particular time and place. In these photographs there is an implied presence of people, the traces of the presence of people – but it remains blurred, and doesn’t lend itself to being immediately identified. The immediate process of identifying is something I attempt to confuse and blur within a methodology of unlearning, in order to slow down the identification process and allow the subtle and complex details to appear and register when encountering both people and landscape.
( Dana Ariel, Amud, 2016)
JP: John Berger in Ways of Seeing explores how seeing comes before words. In Encountering Perforated Ground, you describe the political situation in Israel and Palestine as a ‘crisis of seeing.’ Is this an example of the visual overtaking and preceding language?
DA: Notions of the conflict can be found both in the use of language and ways of seeing. When I spoke of a crisis of seeing I meant it through the lenses of knowledge and sight. For me, it is not a question of one preceding the other, it is how they come into conflict. To visit Fasa’il village and the settlement Peza’el, is to point at the name and the political distinction of village and settlement as what already taint my search. Language and knowledge, in this case, precede seeing and the desire to see that created this exhibition, comes from the need to tamper with prior knowledge and given language. The exhibition is concerned with encountering perforated ground; how one encounters and how can one resist and unlearn in order to encounter without the precedence or over taking of either the visual or language.
JP: Simultaneously, your work explores notions of unseeing and unlearning. How does your position as a photographer engage in these processes? Furthermore, how are these processes inherent in the specific subject matter of the project?
DA: Unseeing begins for me in the photographic act itself. I use a medium format Hasselblad camera and in order to photograph I need to bow my head down to look through the camera at what is in front of me. This is an important gesture that breaks the direct gaze.
I approach verlernen (unlearning) as a process of encountering sites through revisiting, blurring, and erasing. It does not mean erasure as such, but rather emphasizes the use of actions of erasure in the printing process. The materiality of photography becomes the method of experimenting with notions of seeing and unseeing. I often manipulate the film, over expose, overlay, and include interruptions that appear either at the photographed site or through the printing process. For example, a flair that erases part of the frame, or a stain appearing in the print, which was unseen at the site. I enjoy thinking of the negative and the image as excavation sites, where over exposing the film allows the printing process to become the process of seeing what remains.
The photographed sites are where I identify a process of verlernen, sites that present both visually and politically contradicting narratives, traces of erasure and violence, or blurriness. The way I approach the sites with photography and print is to echo what I encountered through matter. Perhaps, the best example is Hainich forest (erased), the seventeen prints record an erasure process of a copper plate. The erasure began because I accidentally scratched the plate. My active erasure and its recording resonates in the German site that have been repeatedly occupied and transformed from a forest, to military base, training ground for tanks, and now a nature reserve, that stands still ‘awaiting nature to return’. In a book format it activates memory as the image slowly disappears, only faint traces remain. Erasing an image is too a violent act.
JP: Your selection for BPF does not directly represent these sites, but is instead concerned with your journey to them. To what extent do you rely on the viewer’s own interpretation to fill in the wider narrative of the project?
DA: The desire is to allow the viewer to create their own narrative. My repeated visits to the sites are intended to show that despite the still images and the deserted landscapes, each encounter is unique and the landscape is constantly changing. The repeated visits and the photographs presented here, are constructed of many encounters. Ariella Azoulay writes in Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography that ‘the event of photography is never over’, unlike the photographed event, the event of photography is made of infinite encounters, by that she refers to encounters on site and the viewer’s encounter with a photograph.
My work presents the journey and search for these sites. What I encounter on the way, beside, before, and after, equally belong to the work. I see it as the shadow and stain of the site, it brings forth the expectation, anticipation, imagination, and disappointments into the work.
How the viewer will encounter my work is out of my reach and therefore fascinating. I offer, make the first gesture, towards an encounter with a viewer.
JP: Within the project, you hand printed the work yourself. In an age that is increasingly focused on digital print making, why did you decide to work by hand?
DA: I introduce my practice and making process through three sites: the visited sites, the sites of making, and the site of exhibition (the encounter with a viewer). Between the visited sites and the sites of making is what I refer to as the blind gap. This term represents the moment light draws an image in the camera obscura. This moment of contact cannot be experienced or seen, it leaves the photographer blind, and creates a mechanical gap. This place fascinates me.
The sites of making, the darkroom and print room, are the attempts to return to the un-experienced moment of the blind gap. In them I stretch the making process and return to the moment of contact. There is a return to the visited site, the narrative, the sights, the colours and contrast, and there is also a departure; a moment when the print, though it remains a trace of the visited site, becomes a work. This experience is important; it is where learning and unlearning takes place, something of the visited site is lost, there is an active process of forgetting, and through it something else appears.
(Dana Ariel: Peza’el, 2015)
JP: Memory and heritage are primary concerns of your work, how do you then reflect this when capturing a specific time and place?
DA: Memory is a construct of events, rather than attending to the monumentality of memory I focus on the process of remembering. Remembering and inheriting already touch on the political and the way culture is constructed. It is concerned with how narratives are told, how they are governed, and disseminated. Images play a vital role in this and this is why my practice is so deeply concerned with photography.
JP: You have previously stated that your work is not strictly autobiographical. In what ways does your own identity and background influence your artistic practice?
DA: My practice stems from the encounter with my identity. My relationship to the following sign (—) that represents my national identity has sparked many questions and emotions over the years and these still figure and inform my practice. In Israeli identity cards, written under the nationality category is a person’s religion when Jewish, followed by the nationality/religion of the mother. When that can’t be determined, a replacement is given.
I previously said that I am putting my identity into practice, by this I meant to see how identity that begins with negation performs in landscape, in practice, and how it can encounter others.
Currently it functions as a method of working and thinking, as a site of unlearning. What I encountered in this form of identity I see as a process of unlearning in the German sense of verlernen, which involves loss as well as learning to forget. It begins with erasure, the necessity to erase the idea of a single identity or narrative, leading the definitions themselves to collapse by introducing the conflicting terms Ashkenazi-Mizrahi, citizen-immigrant, and perpetrator-victim. The same thing I am attempting to recreate in my practice, through different sites and narratives.
JP: Brighton Photo Fringe has a unique approach to art display, focusing on supporting early career practitioners. How does your experience with the festival differ from other exhibitions you have previously been involved with?
I have been incredibly lucky because my last experience of a solo exhibition was the culmination of a three months residency with neo:artists in Bolton. Then and now, working with Brighton Photo Fringe I am benefiting and enjoying total artistic freedom in making curatorial decisions. The exhibition kept changing through the many conversations with BPF team and the incredible support gave me the means, the platform and most importantly the encouragement to speak and share my most recent works and ideas.
Dana Ariel: Encountering Perforated Ground will be at Phoenix Brighton 1-30 October 2016. See more of her work here: www.danaariel.com