Sharon Ya’ari’s exhibition at Haus Esters in Krefeld features a whole room with photographs of birds. The arrangement is reminiscent of an aviary with a view of the garden. However, the viewer soon realizes that none of the birds are shown in flight. They walk or stand around on the street as if they had adapted themselves to the city and the established set of rule for human behavior. Three photographs of wagtails hang next to each other in the exhibition. In the picture on the left, a wagtail is shown walking across the street. In the middle, we see one wagtail walking on a parking space while on the right, two wagtails are walking on the grass of a traffic island: “The natural environment looks different,” one could say. The discrepancy between “nature” and the man-made habitat is made even more pronounced by the two photographs of plastic swans in an artificial pond on a traffic island. It is in these absurd images recalling the situation of migrants that Sharon Ya’ari captures life in a supposedly alien environment.
In another photo, four herons are standing on the side of the road; puddles are visible, it obviously just rained. The artist installed a second photograph alongside it that shows a different view of the street. A single heron can be seen walking over the asphalt street. This is one of the many examples the artist’s use of time jumps and switching views. The stranger and the inner turmoil of existence are at the heart of his interest. Sharon Ya’ari found an almost humorous metaphor for this in conjunction with his series of bird photographs. The two pictures of herons are combined on the wall of the exhibition space in Haus Esters with the photograph of a skater in a barren gray setting, thus putting bird and man on the same level with each other.
In his pictures of people, Sharon Ya’ari often works with the idea of a simple, effective and atmospherically-charged state. To this end, he employs the desert as a backdrop, the emptiness of which charges the occurrence with meaning.
In his play with contradictions, the artist makes frequent use of pairs of images in which the motifs are presented with altered settings, chronological distance or variations of the photographic technique, size and color. The two works Snow Mountain (Two Trucks Full) are exemplary in this regard. The large black and white picture depicts a deserted square in the evening with a pile of snow. Streetlights in the background illuminate the surreal scene; one sees the footsteps of the people who have walked across the square. One thing that is generally true about Sharon Ya’ari’s photographs is that they are always a search for traces and show how people, through their routines, take possession of and give shape to the plazas and their surroundings. This is also true as regards urban planning questions concerning the design of such squares as well as the interaction between architecture and landscape.
Next to the large-format picture of the snowy nocturnal square, Sharon Ya’ari places a small color photograph depicting a crowd of children and adults frolicking about on the snow heap. What an attraction: snow on an urban square under palm trees, transported here on a truck. This snapshot of easy-going life approaches playful questions of social interaction and the local circumstances of a country.
Another recurring theme in his work that is made particularly evident in these two pictures is the play with the presence and absence of people. The picture showing the pile of snow on the square with numerous persons represents the strongest possible contrast to the adjacent image of the empty nocturnal square. A considerable distance to the viewer prevails here to the extent that none of the depicted persons looks directly into the camera. There is no reciprocal perception between the photographed persons and the viewers or the photographer, respectively.
In many cases, the motifs of Sharon Ya’ari’s pictures evoke opposites and contradictions. This is particularly true of the works that show living beings, whether animal or human. Sea Promenade (2019) presents the viewer with two young girls dressed in school uniforms consisting of a long dark skirt and long-sleeved sweaters. In another picture we see two stylish teenagers wearing hot pants taking a walk through the park (Ramat Hanadiv Gardens, 2019). The two worlds introduced here — the severity of school on the one hand and leisure time laissez faire on the other — seem to be far apart from each other. Their inner and outer contrast is not morally weighed against each other but comprehended as an inherently interwoven basic condition of existence and stand quite naturally next to each other.
Sharon Ya’ari observes things over long periods of time. Time even plays a role in the two photographs of the same two girls (Sea Promenade, 2019). In one of them, they were photographed sitting on a promenade, in the other we see them walking hand in hand on the beach. The situation has been only slightly altered and yet we believe that we have gained an intimate poetic insight into the lives of the two girls. We sense familiarity and proximity; perhaps they are sisters or close friends. The fact that this story comes to life through the contrast becomes evident from the different backgrounds. As a result of the change in the photographer’s perspective, we see the harbor with enormous ships like steel giants in the one picture and the beach with the sea in the other. This form of private view, whether undertaken by the artist himself or extracted from found material, is almost always the procedure that Sharon Ya’ari uses as a means of conveying the conditions of human existence.
Sharon Ya’ari’s work is as such characterized by a complex web of conceptually pursued strategies and narrative contents. Along with his own photographs, he makes use of found material in his work, integrating chance in the shape of developmental defects. Through specific forms of presenting his pictures — for example framed or attached directly onto the wall, the respective size of the prints or the combination of images — he creates a multifacetedness that consistently opens up new cross references and surprising dialogue possibilities.
Two women on a bed (Pic, 1994, 2019). This photograph hangs in the Haus Esters exhibition next to the pictures of the two girls on the beach. It should be noted that the two persons in all three of these photographs are depicted mirror situations. Sharon Ya’ari’s interest in this constellation is not only due to formal-compositional aspects but is also related to content. The dynamic of the double gaze is always based on the intention of assuring and correcting, is always also an expression and a means of reflection.
Like the girls on the beach, the two girls on the bed are dressed in dark skirts and white blouses, thus representing a doubling and a connection between the different photographs. Sharon Ya’ari found the source image (measuring 9 × 13 cm) in a garbage container at a large Tel Aviv photo laboratory. The picture presumably derives from a personal context and would probably now be pasted in a photo album if it were not so out of focus. It shows a typical private situation; maybe it was taken somewhere on holiday, in a motel or hotel, the first snapshot of the trip made after unpacking the luggage and before heading off to eat or for a walk on the promenade. The integration of such found material plays an important role for Sharon Ya’ari especially against the historical backdrop of his country. The blurred nature of the print is likewise to be seen with a view to content, namely in the sense of blurred memory, and not only in formal terms. The artist once emphasized in an interview that the black and white pictures in his family’s photo albums always showed deceased persons while the still living people were photographed in color, but it is the now also the case that these last pictures are increasingly fading. 1
The photograph for his 2020 piece Immigrant, 1933 comes from his father’s extensive archive. Sharon Ya’ari photographed this source image with a medium format camera some fifteen years ago. The black spot that made the face of the woman captured in the picture unrecognizable was caused by flaw while developing the film. Especially when chance intervenes in the production process, the artist makes use of the resulting blurs or spots that completely obliterate specific passages like deliberate means of expression. The past and the present interlock in this way. Integrating found images from archives, private photo albums or the waster container of a photo labor into his works offers Sharon Ya’ari the opportunity to take a look at his country’s history and current events.
The image of the woman, faceless and nameless, who probably emigrated from Europe to the British Palestine Mandate, thus escaping the then still unforeseeable fate of the Shoah, is directed at the expulsion, flight and murder of Jews in Germany, whereby title and extinction coincide here as an inexorable truth.
1“Sharon Ya’ari in Conversation with Vered Maimon,” in: Sharon Ya’ari, Leap Toward Yourself, ed. by Urs Stahel, Sharon Ya’ari and Michael Gordon (Göttingen, 2014), p. 228.