Irit Tamari Looking Glass to the Past, Interior Display

Printed photographs are Irit Tamari’s primary material. She cuts them up, deconstructs, and reconstructs them into sculptures, installations, or three dimensional collages. In this exhibition, Tamari displays two works based on photographs taken by Frank Scholten, a Dutch photographer who documented the Land of Israel in the 1920s, leaving behind a substantial archive of some 20,000 images of the region. From these thousands, Tamari selected outdoor views of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, then still separate cities. She printed them on transparencies, cut and interwove them with other photographs. The result is a three-dimensional collage of a landscape, attached to the museum’s window. “Each photograph of a place permeates into the photograph of a different place,” Tamari explains, “creating a stratified space that could have been viewed through the window, now surging inward, a century after it was first captured.”
The second work, showcased in a glass vitrine, focuses on interior views, houses under construction, and the people who populated the emerging urban space.
It simulates a building that could have housed the diverse population documented through Scholten’s lens.
In both works, Tamari raises questions not only about the ways in which cities, landscapes, and houses are constructed, but also about what has been forgotten, destroyed, or erased from a given place.