PERSPECTIVES
The series Hotel presents itself first of all as a tribute by the artist to two important figures of the Israeli cultural scene of the 1950s: the architect Abba Elchanani and the photographer David Serry.
Considered one of the most important architects in Israel, Abba Elchanani (1818-2008) was in charge of the construction of many buildings between the years 1966 and 1992 (the President's State residence for example). In 1948, Elchanani was commissioned to build a building in the suburb of Givatayim, near Tel Aviv: it was both an apartment building and a hotel where couples secretly came to meet.
Photographer David Serry (1913-1981), meanwhile, was a photographer. Fascinated by historical sites and Israeli urban life, he was particularly known for his portraits of anonymous people, with which he was able to take a quasi-anthropological look at the society of his time.
When he died, his son Shlomo discovered in the attic of the family home a large collection of negatives belonging to his father. Convinced of their quality and of the sociological interest that these images had to offer, Shlomo undertook important conservation and archiving work and gave Tali Amitai-Tabib free access to this immense photographic collection.
From that moment, she sought to give a second life, not only to these negatives but also to the history of this building and the residents who occupied it. It is, in his eyes, a powerful metaphor of Tel Aviv life, made up of a plurality of ethnic origins, social categories and mores that are widely accepted today.
By the process of photo-montage, already used in his previous series Trudl and To Discover America, the artist included characters photographed by David Serry in the shots she herself took inside the building in 2021. These anonymous characters did not necessarily know each other and did not have beforehandnothing in common except a certain desire to celebrate life and experience moments of freedom that the society of the time did not tolerate.
Between documentary and fiction, the artist continues his exploration of Israeli society, as it has been constructed, between challenges, paradoxes, the weight of history and a thirst for modernity...
Olivier Waltman
Paris, October 2022
To Discover America - 2016-2019
For To Discover America series, Tali Amitai-Tabib researched the historical archives of the American photography, focusing specifically on women’s representation. The artist studied the works of photographers from the XNUMX’s to the XNUMX’s, such as Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Jack Delano. It took her four years to build this body of work that questions, from a woman’s perspective, the concept of conquest of new territories, as a metaphor of an interior path.
She keeps a large place for subjectivity and comments: “I want to tell a story; I don't have to tell the truth”. The artist starts from a story or a contemporary event and presents her own vision through the technique of photographic montage.
To Discover America is mostly focused on women from the 30’s until the 1950’s whom the artist integrates in landscapes from her homeland – pictures taken over 40 years of career -, often empty and somehow dark. Her photographs convey a feeling of concern - anxiety even - as these women appear lonely and have to face the dangers of the world.
Olivier Waltman
Paris, 2019
Series Trudl - 2014-2015
With Trudl, Israeli artist Tali Amitai-Tabib not only deals with personal topics, such as her own story, her family and private life, but she also questions the complexity and tight link between memory and fiction. This project, result of five years of research, is presented as a photographic and literary installation.
Trudl was the mother’s cousin of the artist whom she has never met and whose family was forced to leave Germany at the beginning of the World War II. She found refuge in England, where she dreamed to become a photographer.
The artist, intrigued by the particular destiny of this character, met Trudl’s direct descendant, Patricia R., who lives nowadays in Surrey. The latter helped her in her research and, together, they found out who Trudl was. Tali Amitai-Tabib started travelling in Great Britain and went where Trudl had lived, worked, got married, and raised her daughter. This photographic series renders sixty years of Trudl’s life.
Trudl has never fulfilled her dream to become a photographer. Therefore, this photographic series is a fiction: it shows what pictures Trudl could have taken, what she could have captured with her camera, and as a result, what her life could have looked like.
Tali Amitai-Tabib – a relative - attracts the spectator into an exercise introspection, where reality and fantasy mix up and where imagination recreates a potential reality.
Tali Amitai-Tabib
Tel Aviv, 2015
Series Lomo - 2011
In its form, the Series Lomo is a succession of shots taken over several years at random locations (Tel-Aviv, Vienna…), encounters, moments. The artist invites us to leaf through his memory notebook, without comments, without indications, just following his emotions.
Its "Lomo" brand camera is a small, simple tool that is easy to carry. Its simplicity is its strength because it is always within reach. Tali Amitai-Tabib is a real “Lomo-Trotteuse”, she never separates herself from it in her travels in order to be able to capture in the moment, almost without a priori, without thinking about it, a face or a most intimate landscape.
This exhibition is part of a big collection of images I made since September XNUMX.
Tali Amitai-Tabib
Tel Aviv, 2011
Series Concert Halls - 2008-2009
Music has always played a crucial role in my life, as a woman and as an artist. Vienna was a must-see destination for me, in the sense that it had a double symbolic significance: world capital of music in the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries. It is still today a city where music is “made”, played and played out, and interpreted. In this sense, it appeared to me as an emblematic cultural bridge between the centuries, between what was composed there and what can be listened to every evening in its many concert halls.
For the first time in the Cultural Stations cycle, I allowed myself to photograph characters: musicians on a rehearsal day. The eminently lively nature of music in Vienna today gives me almost no other choice.
On a more formal level, the example of a piano posed on the stage in an empty theater allowed me to push further this plastic research on the question of the immense space, which is filled with the presence of a object of much smaller proportions. This emptiness was not. The light, the sounds, and the mental projection of the spectator of each photograph, will perhaps find to tie to the perspectives and the rigorous geometries of these architectures.
Tali Amitai-Tabib
Tel Aviv, 2009
Series The author's space - 2007
Offices of Israeli writers and poets.
We read books without ever having to meet their authors. The media tell us about it, show us a public image, and gives us the illusion of knowing them. In the project The author's space, I tried to draw their portrait beyond the physical presence by photographing their most intimate space: their office.
In my series on libraries, museums and concert halls, we find ourselves in the presence of public spaces, shaped both by architects and successive generations of works on display. Here, the space is organized by the artist for her own work.
A second line of thought seemed relevant to me: to confront the timelessness of places destined to endure with the ephemeral life of an office which will disappear at the same time as the writer who uses it. Contemporary Israeli literature occurs in these workplaces, and I have sought to fix their physical reality in time, as a way to approach the concept of artistic inspiration.
Tali Amitai-Tabib
Tel Aviv, 2007
Series Museum - 2007
When I was born, Israel was five years old. Almost everything around me had just been built. The cities and neighborhoods seemed to me untouched by all life and color. The clothes we wore looked like uniforms, as their faded colors did not attract the eye. As a child, I felt very dissatisfied with what I saw. I had not known anything but my most immediate environment, but I was certain that there was somewhere a colorful and rich world of diversity.
Thirty-five years later, I have embarked on a "photographic dialogue" with different forms of artistic expression envisioned in their presentation space: libraries in Oxford, museums in Florence and concert halls in Vienna. In these places that I have scrupulously taken care to empty, the trace of man and the movements of light appear as metaphors of knowledge and creation.
I aim to explore the relation of the object to the space that surrounds it. In the case of the museums of Florence, I was interested in this recurring dialectic around the question of beauty, which plays out between the works on display and the magnificence of the architecture of the palaces. The rooms are often very spacious; some are so filled with sculptures and paintings that others arouse astonishment so much they seem empty. And each time, the natural light that I had the authorization to let in by opening the shutters, came to bring harmony and a feeling of power to these museum staging.
Tali Amitai-Tabib
Tel Aviv, 2007
Series libraries - 2001
When we mention the term “library” in contemporary art, two major works come to mind, as starting points for exploring this theme: Anselm Kiefer’s library – The High Priestess: Land of The Two Rivers (1985-89) and, by Micha Ullman, the Library underground of Bebelplatz in Berlin (1995). These works are in reality memorials – one as the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization, the other as testimony to the burnings of May 10, 1933. In both cases, the concept of "the library", as a storehouse of knowledge human, research and creation, seems to collapse and what remains claims to bear witness to the emptiness of the present.
In this context, the libraries photographed by Amitai-Tabib – museums that carry and preserve what humanity has stored during its existence, and despite its existence – are presented with an idea of tranquility and well-being. Its libraries are empty of any users.
Character point; only the arrangements provided for him (a moved chair waiting for its occupant; a table lamp) attest that he has not yet arrived, unless he has already left. Nevertheless, the measure of human culture is clearly palpable: the spaces are meticulously organized, with a well-balanced symmetry while the geometric mesh of the endless aisles of shelves seems to offer a frame for photography. The light coming back through the windows and doors clearly highlights the architectural features. The exterior, for its part, almost always remains out of the field and lets the idea of intimacy or even confinement predominate in all the works.
In almost all the photographs in this series, Amitai-Tabib manages to hide several details of the library, which find themselves incorporated, absorbed by the space which has in turn become a sacred site imposing silence on those who enter it. And at the same time, the enigmatic atmosphere of the place seems to reach outwards, mysterious and visionary.
This oscillation between the feeling of being locked in with no possibility of escape and this light so worked that it causes a tiny tremor is familiar to us since it belongs to another library, considered one of the main architectural achievements of the renaissance: the library Medici in Florence. Its famous staircases profoundly influenced the design of the sublime by Mark Rothko and influenced the murals he planned for the "Four Seasons" restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, just after his return from Florence in 1959: "after working there for a while, I realized that I was unconsciously under the influence of Michelangelo's walls in the climb to access the Medici library in Florence. He managed to achieve this idea that I'm pursuing - to give the spectators the feeling that they are trapped in a room whose doors and windows have been bricked up, so that the only thing to do is bang their heads against the walls ".
Mordechai Omer
Extract from the preface of the exhibition catalog Libraries at Tel Aviv University (Genia Schreiber University Art Gallery, 2001)