Keren Zaltz | Untitled (Tower), 2021

The work explores the city as a space where layers of time coexist, bringing together two perspectives on the same structure, decades apart. In the background appears an aerial photograph of Tel Aviv from the late 1960s, showing the Shalom Tower shortly after its construction was completed—a prominent symbol of progress, growth, and soaring ambition. Superimposed on this historical image is a contemporary photograph of the tower, taken with a Polaroid camera and reworked.
The encounter between the two images compresses different times onto a single plane. The tower appears simultaneously as a new object and a historical one—as an urban landmark and as a testament to the changes the city around it has undergone.
As part of the processing of the contemporary photograph, time-locating elements—such as advertisements and signage—were removed. The removal was not carried out to erase the present or reconstruct the past, but rather to examine how urban images accumulate in memory and how certain structures continue to hold meaning even as their surroundings change. Like us, the tower examines the relationships between urban vision, memory, and processes of change, as well as the way structures become anchors within a landscape in constant motion.