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Ezra Nahmad, Leave

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Ezra Nahmad describes figures and narratives of exile, spanning immigration, exodus, cosmopolitism, and globalization. The fragility and ferocity of the sense of belonging, instinctual reactions against confinement, the desire to flee. The disparity of experiences in a confined territory. The exhibition at Les Douches La Galerie accompanies Leave, the last component of Ezra Nahmad’s Israeli trilogy.  

My parents were twenty-five years old when they left Egypt. My great-grandparents themselves were expatriates fromTurkey, Syria, and Morocco, where they were born, in order to move to Egypt. We had not considered exile as a loss or as going astray. Circulating around the Mediterranean was our business. The move to Israel put an end to this moment in our history. We donned our new clothing of colonizing survivors and prodigal sons. I did not want to put them on, I chose Europe. Now I feel, once again, the winds changing, bringing Europe and the Middle East into one same tortuous movement. Previously cosmopolitan, dedicated to cross-boarder exchanges, Middle Eastern countries adapted to globalization, but while demanding blind nationalism. Israel and the Middle East as a whole have become laboratories of globalization. In this system, an exodus of resources, labor, populations, and terror are tools of power and a flaw. A necessity and an impossibility. A place of newfound freedom for some, and of tyranny for others, Israel is a land torn apart where all sorts of vagrants collide, those who blossom and those who shatter to pieces. Open to Jews who emigrate to change their lives, Israel locks in another people, the Palestinians, impeding their slightest movement. Alongside these two figures of the emancipated immigrant and the exiled outcast on his or her own land, we meet the disillusioned Israeli obsessed with expatriation, the African refugee, and the working migrant. From this unusual neighborhood, it could be said that Israel perpetuates an almost mystical belief: leave, change your life, start over somewhere else. Preoccupied for some time by the mirage of this paradoxical utopia and the echoing war in Syria, I photographed Palestinians shut away or about to be expelled, Israelis who would have really liked to run away, Syrian houses abandoned on the Golan,detached Asian workers, even the stranger with a blurred identity, representing a globalized trust or an international organization. And the contorted intersection of these lives, the absence of self, the impossibility of exile.

Ezra Nahmad

 
 

Exhibition
Ezra Nahmad, Leave
From January 20 through February 25, 2017
Les Douches la Galerie
5, rue Legouvé
75010 Paris
France

www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com

Book
Ezra Nahmad, Leave,
Published by Peperoni Books
27 euros

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