Page 8 - WTP VOl. XII #1

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Photographs Cut Up and Layered
On a 2018 trip to Israel, in a used-book store, Vainsencher found Treasures of the Bible Lands, a catalogue for a 1987 exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition showed artifacts found in and around what we now call Israel, Palestine, and their neighboring countries. The catalogue featured striking photographic documentation of the artifacts of myriad ancient civilizations in the Middle East. Since acquir- ing the catalogue, she has been physically and conceptually mining it to produce a body of work: photographs of the book’s pages are cut up and layered. By making holes in the photos, Vainsencher physically edited out the objects, leaving only negative spaces and the shadows that they had cast on their lurid backgrounds. These ravaged pages became fuel for images that call to mind the holes in the ground after an archeological expedition has departed; the negative space left behind by something that has been taken away. They also point to the fraught relationship between the archeological record and claims of ownership over land and narrative in
the Middle East. By removing the “treasures” from their lush backgrounds Vainsencher exposes the mechanisms of power and money that dictate these relationships.
Gabriela Vainsencher