לחצות את הגבול עם רימון (To Cross the Border with a Pomegranate)

This exhibition presents selected works from the practice-led research project entitled 'Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground' by Dana Ariel.

In her works Dana Ariel experiments with methods of 'verlernen', the German word which translates as the process of unlearning in English or forgetting in Hebrew. This verb contains within its meaning an action that is both passive and active, it suggests an act of undoing, a form of return and even erasure or remaking. For Ariel, this is linked to the desire for a process that must be constantly at work. In her practice, she explores the conceptual, political, material and poetic interpretations and implications of the process on the landscape and ways of seeing. This is done using analogue printing processes of photographs and hybrid printmaking techniques, video, sound, text and abstract notions of drawing. Landscape and language form the basis of her search for moments of misidentification and misreading that could offer generative ways to challenge the single reading of images and words.

Cultural and political narratives weaved with the artist’s biography are explored through her visits to sites in the UK, Germany, Israel and Palestine, as well as in the material sites of making, such as the darkroom and print room. The encounters with these sites raise questions regarding methods of identification and how they manifest themselves in the landscape and in photography. These boundaries between the different methods of identification and identities blur further through the collapse of dichotomies such as hospitality and hostility, poetics and politics, access and restrictions.