Photographic act in the spirit of protest in the Morel Drefler Gallery, Musrara Mix Festival #22
The photographic action, which will take place in the spirit of protest that goes through the 2022 Musrara Mix Festival, will be held in the conceptual-aesthetic space between the digital and the analog, and in the physical space of the Morel Drefler Gallery floor, the analog laboratory and digital photography studio. The act is rooted in a double motivation – to slow down the immediate and faster digital medium and at the same time to speed up the lengthy and slow analog medium. This will take shape through a hybrid digital-analog image, created from the amalgamation of different means of production, fusing together analog aesthetics – black and white print, chemically developed on photosensitive paper that mediates analog (similarity) relationship, with digital aesthetics – the pixel and the use of screen and file formats.
The modes of production and the appearance of the digital pixel on the analog paper wish to set an alternative and disrupt the temporal constants and visual appearance of the mediums. The exhibition will take shape and accumulate throughout the festival, alongside a protest performance in Ha’ayin Chet Courtyard by the native-American rapper Kunu Dittmer-Bearchum. The photographic act will wish to give a decelerated-digital and accelerated-analog visual expression to gestures of protest by the festival’s visitors, who will be invited to take their photo while performing acts of protest and taking part in the action, carried out and operated by the students of the Photography Department.
The exhibition also summarizes decades and thousands of hours of students’ activity in the analog and traditional printing lab. With that, it pays homage not only to the medium itself but also to the people who have spent long hours over the years in the school’s analog facilities, a moment before the place will change forever.
Curatorial accompaniment: Asaf Alboher