THE RABBIT HOLE

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Alice's fall into the rabbit hole is a transition into a world where rules change and reality mixes with imagination. Two parallel worlds - reality and dream - melt into each other. Concepts of space and time shift, physical laws dissolve, new things are revealed.
 

The five photographers featured in the exhibition choose to view reality through a blind gaze that turns inward, back to pre-verbal realms and inner spaces. There, they find their own Wonderland. They direct their camera’s lens at reality, but their observation does not produce answers; rather, it raises questions. Reality becomes disrupted. Perhaps, from the moment it is observed, it transforms, reshaped as a hybrid with one foot in reality and the other in fantasy.

Perhaps there’s a magical force in their act of photography. Once the gaze touches reality, something happens, disarranges, or changes. This could be the "observer effect," a scientific term describing how observing and measuring an event can alter it.

Efrat Arnon Barzilai seeks moments where the unknown and the incomprehensible coexist with the concrete and the understood. Her world is inhabited by ghostly figures, and the tangible body is in constant conflict between trance and stillness. Are the wrapped faces a state of blindness or an opportunity for a new perspective on reality? The head coverings, closed eyes, the neutralization of some senses, and the capacity to perceive reality enable symbolic entry into the dream world and a refusal to accept reality at face value. Welcome to Wonderland, a journey from logic to nonsense…

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Dafna Ichilov

23.11.2017

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​Group Exhibition: Daniella Contini, Carmela Kit, Lily Saltiel, Federica Sardos Albertini, Efrat Arnon Barzilai