An exhibition of recent photographs of Israel and the West Bank by Frederic Brenner is on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery until July 3, 2015. An Archeology of Fear and Desire is part of an unprecedented photographic project initiated by Brenner, which explores Israel and the West Bank as place and metaphor. An Archeology of Fear and Desire is Brenner’s contribution to This Place, an epic photographic project he conceived of in 2005. He imagined inviting artists from around the world to come to Israel “neither to praise nor condemn but to question and reveal, to look beyond the headlines and into the fault-lines.”
Twelve internationally acclaimed photographers traveled to Israel between 2009 and 2013, representing the most illustrious group of artists ever to turn their collective attention to Israel. This exhibition is curated by Charlotte Cotton, the former head of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
An Archeology of Fear and Desire, the exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery and Brenner’s own contribution to This Place, represents the first showing of work from the project in the U.S. Brenner explores Israel as a place of radical otherness, delving into longing, belonging and exclusion through portraits and landscapes. “It is an essay about devouring myths and how social and religious constructions, perpetuate a tyranny of roles which render us strangers to what is most intimate in us,” Brenner writes.
From 1978 to 2003, Brenner chronicled the Jewish Diaspora in more than 40 countries. In Exile at Home, the second part of the exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery, Brenner traced the lives of 14 Jewish families for more than 30 years. “It’s been an exploration of the human condition through a hole in the door,” he notes. The exhibition documents families he portrayed both in their respective countries in the Diaspora and in Israel, where he found them after they emigrated.
EXHIBITION
An Archeology of Fear and Desire
Frederic Brenner
From May 7th to July 3rd, 2015
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York NY 10022
USA
http://www.howardgreenberg.com
