Sharon Ya’ari

Leap Toward Yourself

About

*Shadows*, B’nei Or Street, Beersheba, 2012
110 × 134 cm

*Bridge with Flowers*, Route 42, 2013
152 × 188 cm

*Mosaic (double exposure at 90-degree turn)*, 2013
180 × 227 cm

*Tree Trunk*, near Kibbutz Mashabei Sade, 2011
154 × 180 cm

A personal perspective on local, historical narratives and on the power and limits of photography to refute or reconstruct them.

Distinct places and objects are photographed repeatedly, at intervals ranging from a single thought to minutes or years — not simply as the documentation of change, but as the raw material of tragedy, as a survival and as historical evidence.

The element of time in these works is present as a kind of raw material in different states of being. It is not a critical moment, but rather a prolonged encounter with things — piling up, accumulating, but more often, slowly being subtracted. Things are suspended by their history. Time is connected to survival, the minimum necessary for society to exist, to keep its head above water. These diptychs appear as elemental structures in my work throughout the years in different bodies of work.

Leap Toward Yourself was displayed in 2013 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The exhibition included several works from earlier projects: Hope for Long Distance Photography, Jerusalem Blvd and Expectancy (2005–2013).

Coterminous with the exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, a book also titled Leap Toward Yourself, which collected and summarized the creative output of those years, was published by Steidl.

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