Press - Yossi Milo Gallery

http://www.blouinartinfo.com/photo-galleries/5-must-see-gallery-shows-nancy-graves-steven-cox-and-more?image=16
http://www.loeildelaphotographie.com/2015/01/28/exhibition/27097/new-york-assaf-shaham-division-of-thevision?utm_source=Liste+de+diffusion+EN&utm_campaign=1d03c58c99EN_2015_01_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ae1f055795-1d03c58c99-178895769
AS: No I cant escape that connection even if I try. I can tell you that I remember where I was what I did and everything that happened
on 9/11, we all share this collective memory that you mentioned.08.29.11
The media is absolutely controlling our history narrative, this has
been the roll of the media since always, but I think that the most important issue is how we remember. The media has all kind of
Interests beside telling us the “real” story.
THITH: We don’t know too much about you and the official bio on your site isn’t much help, so,
what can you tell us about yourself?
Assaf Shaham: O.K so, I’m 27 years old, born in Jerusalem live and have worked in Tel Aviv for over 7
years. I Graduated from MINSHAR School Of Art where I studied photography and art but my biggest
loves and inspirations are cinema and music and I worked as a film editor for many years.
THITH: Your ‘American Dream’ series is what we first noticed. Really, they are just beautiful
images. Color photographs of monuments stretched but there are some other images mixed in,
what’s the narrative of these works collectively?
AS: Thank you!! Maybe it’s early to say what the narrative is… I’m not sure that I know what it is in this
point, it is an ongoing project that deals with the power, capital technology and the (western) human desire
to always want it bigger & faster for only 0.99$. I try to undermine the icons that represent it the best
because capital have many forms… sculptures, architecture, cars and many many more, for me they are
all Representations of Aggressive power that we all have a love hate relationship with.
THITH: There’s also a kind of nostalgic veneer to the whole thing with the colours evoking old
postcards of national U.S. landmarks that were, perhaps, more respected in the past. Is this a
nostalgia for a certain kind of America or a deconstruction of that nostalgia? Is it nostalgia for a
type of photographic image?
AS: It is defeletlly a deconstruction of that America/Israel–which tries to simulate the U.S everything it
does–and almost all western cultures-I don’t have any nostalgic feelings for this money and power
monuments–but the nostalgic veneer come from the material that I use, once again as you said-from old
postcards. This postcards were sent from U.S to Israel by Israeli people on vacations–I like the stories that
are written on them–and the title of this project also refers to Israeli people that dream to travel America
and see the monuments—people here in Israel used to think that the U.S was really larger than life.
THITH: The rough stretched pixilation is obviously far more tactile then what digital
manipulations are capable of now, what does the surface of these images mean to
you?
AS: The material that i use is very important to me, I could easily downloaded any images
like this from the internet and manipulated them, but the tension between the actual old
material (the old postcards) and the digital manipulation is an axis that I love to work
around, also the way that I work doesn’t give full control over the result, the places that you
don’t have that control and things happens by mistake is the places that interest me the
most and give the images this tactile feeling
THITH: I have to say, that as a New Yorker, I still have a visceral reaction to the
absence of the towers in my skyline and I actually miss them. I often find myself
walking down certain streets and and trying to remmber where they used to be. So, I
weirdly found your image of them stretched impossibly tall kind of cathartic. I
realize that probably wasn’t your intention but there does seem to be collective
memory of September 11 that was lived through television and the media. Your
image with it’s warped pixilation and towers growing in the opposite directions can’t
escape that connection. What role does media play in the construction of our
memory of contemporary history?
AS: No I cant escape that connection even if I try. I can tell you that I remember where I
was what I did and everything that happened on 9/11, we all share this collective memory
that you mentioned. The media is absolutely controlling our history narrative, this has been
the roll of the media since always, but I think that the most important issue is how we
remember. The media has all kind of Interests beside telling us the “real” story.
THITH: Most of your work seems to play with media interfaces—websites, video pixilation—what is it
about these systems that interest you?
AS: Most of the time we take things for granted, we know the story and we are happy with that–I try take
advantage of the gaps inside the narrative and offer a different one, maybe not the “right” one but I never seek
Truth, it doesn’t exist and its not interesting is my opinion. So I want to undermine and deconstruct certain
stories and the these systems allows me to do it, especially the internet, in the internet space the possibility to
undermine the system from inside is bigger because power relations are more democratic and a Mediator
factor isn’t as much of a factor. Its a great space to do art.
THITH: Through interactive pieces to Facebook, you command us listen to whole works by Bach,
Bernhard Herman then study move scenes like the bomber in Dr. Stranglove shot by shot. In some
cases (all cases?) the music is from the scene you’re deconstructing. It’s Youtube without video, film
without motion, music delivered through compressed laptop speakers and perhaps most
contradictory, Facebook with an attention span. Is that your intention or what do you think of all that?
AS: I think that the key word for my work and for this one in particular is deconstruction, but really in this
project I’m in the roll of decomposing the original and the viewer is composing a new creation. I really like how
you put it and I think that the project deals a lot with the systems of Youtube and Facebook and how we use it.
I would add that for me its also deals with the relations between the artist and the viewer and how we can
switch rolls so fast in the age of the Internet. In the situation I set up, there is nothing until you decide to click
rapidly over and over on you mouse.
THITH: What about the sites themselves? Other than their immense popularity, is there anything that
makes them useful to you?
AS: One of the reasons I chose Facebook is that I wanted to make use of it’s picture album platform. It has a
built in loop mechanism and because of it the movies can never end. I isolate shots so that the lead nowhere
and the hereos/viewers are stuck in the loop. And to make it more effective, I chose climactic scenes which
become stripped of their normal film drama and action and offer a new one that leads to nowhere.
Youtube is one of the most democratic tools on the internet, you can find almost anything there and anyone
can upload their own video. Really though, my chosen soundtracks were only a suggestions. I wanted people
to use the comments an suggest them own chosen soundtracks and to create a dialogue between people–it
never happened.
THITH: What about the films themselves? Do you see yourself as attacking, defending or neutral to your source material?
AS: Well, I use materials that I love, Kubrick, Hitchcock and home made videos.. im not in the position to attack/defend them I just remix themes and
create something new… most of the time I’m just trying to have fun.
THITH: What are you working on now?
AS: I always like to work on more than one thing but my project these days is actually involve with another American icon and one of my favorite
actors: John Wayne. It’s going to be a film collage made out of hundreds scenes from all of his movies I would love to tell you more but i dont know yet
what it’s going like to be in the end. The most interesting things happens by mistake.
A photographer with politics in the frame
Award-winning photographer Assaf Shaham, winner of the Constantiner Photography Award, has a
new exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, one that blends art with political activism.
When Assaf Shaham looks through his camera lens, he sees the world differently.
For Shaham, photography is a tool for critiquing society, which he does with nimble, penetrating virtuosity.
Shaham manipulates with his photographs, examining multiple uses for his lenses, playing with scans and
layering over his images with visual quotations from photographs and films.
His work revolves around an ars poetica, a device and theory of
expression, one that takes the medium of photography and
applies to it social and political messages. For such fine work,
he has not received the attention he deserves.
Now, at last, he has an exhibit at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
His road to this exhibit has been surprisingly smooth. He
graduated last year from the Minshar School of Art in Tel
Aviv. In 2011, while still a student, he won the Shpilman
Prize for Excellence in Photography. Last April, he put on a
solo exhibition at the Tempo Rubato Gallery.
He also took his talents outside of the country, doing a residency at Berlin's Schir Art Concepts, a project
center and creative incubator that nurtures relationships between Israeli and German artists. When it rains
accolades, however, it really pours, because Shaham had to cut his residency short when he was awarded the
Constantiner Photography Award for an Israeli artist.
This prize, from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, has been awarded every year since 1999 to one or more Israeli
artists. Past recipients include Adi Nes, Pavel Wolberg, Roi Kuper and Michal Chelbin. On September 7,
Shaham’s award-winning exhibition, "New Ways to Steal Old Souls," opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
A simple, unconscious love
1.21.12
Assaf Shaham uses new ways to convene old souls to discuss mythological issues that have
fascinated visual culture even before it was assigned theories. With calculated lightness, Shaham
travels the tracks of discourse in parallel, opposing and circular directions. He creates poetic images
while provoking the artificial intelligence of sophisticated mechanisms, disrupts the operating
instructions of advanced equipment and defiantly breaches the accepted codes of ethics and esthetics.
He applies basic manipulations onto complex instruments, thus juxtaposing myths of prehistoric
culture—e.g. the primitive belief that drawing a living creature subjugates it or removes its soul—with
modernism in art, with constitutive theories of 20th- century history of photography, with post-modernist
subversion and with contemporary commentaries of popular, virtual and cellular culture. With a
seemingly innocent move, whose visual expression is simple and succinct, he renews complex
controversies that were considered long outdated. He posits, near a bluish field of wireless-controlled
security cameras standing erect like flowering squills—collected throughout public spaces in London
and joined into one photograph whose gradual colorfulness is reminiscent of three-dimensional
imaging—reminders to the early days of photography, among them a key work that defines the basic
principle of photography.
The photograph Writer/Storyteller has a black-and-white
three-dimensional scan of hollow portraits from August
Sander’s book People of the 20th Century. Shaham cut
out the images and turned this colossal project into a
topography depleted of 20 th-century characters yet
reflecting, through the cuttings, theories of physiognomy
and typological photography. On the surface of the
scanned object, which is also a sculpture of a book and
an archeological excavation of the history of
photography, is the author’s missing reflection, with the
designation “Storyteller” added in the title.
In a 2011 inkjet printing of a three-dimensional scan, the
author from Sander’s 1929 silver print meets The
Storyteller of Jeff Wall’s colorful light box (1986).
This meeting convenes a re-reading of Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The Death of the Author” and
Michel Foucault’s response to it, the following year, in the essay “What is an Author?” as well as of
post-modern literary criticism and of the cultural studies of the past two decades, offering a
reflexive model of reading literature according to subjective reality and reading reality according to
textual interpretation. Through other works by Shaham, that include quotations, appropriations and
reproductions, the discussion is extended towards the arena of cyberspace, beyond the death of the
author and the written work to the era of electronic words and details, and to the birth of the hyperreader and hyper-text.
The photograph Writer/Storyteller has a black-andwhite three-dimensional scan of hollow portraits from
August Sander’s book People of the 20th Century.
Shaham cut out the images and turned this colossal
project into a topography depleted of 20 th-century
characters yet reflecting, through the cuttings, theories
of physiognomy and typological photography. On the
surface of the scanned object, which is also a sculpture
of a book and an archeological excavation of the
history of photography, is the author’s missing
reflection, with the designation “Storyteller” added in the
title. In a 2011 inkjet printing of a three-dimensional
scan, the author from Sander’s 1929 silver print
meets The Storyteller of Jeff Wall’s colorful light box
(1986).
This meeting convenes a re-reading of Roland Barthes’ 1968 essay “The Death of the Author”
and Michel Foucault’s response to it, the following year, in the essay “What is an Author?” as
well as of post-modern literary criticism and of the cultural studies of the past two decades,
offering a reflexive model of reading literature according to subjective reality and reading reality
according to textual interpretation. Through other works by Shaham, that include quotations,
appropriations and reproductions, the discussion is extended towards the arena of cyberspace,
beyond the death of the author and the written work to the era of electronic words and details,
and to the birth of the hyper-reader and hyper-text.
Unlike the masterpieces of photography that Sherrie Levine
appropriated in the reproductions carefully printed and
exhibited in her name, Shaham presents anonymous
images downloaded from databases or file-sharing
websites or scanned from books and journals. For Shaham,
photographs disseminated in any media are common
objects, and just as the early ready-mades were
transposed from their original surroundings to museum
spaces through changing their context and function, so he
samples photographs from advertisements and websites
onto the body of his work and to the space of the exhibition.
The series “Full Reflection” continues Shaham’s silent iconoclasm, desecrating not only books of
master photographers and rights of anonymous ones, but also his own status as an artist, and
praising the works of table scanners. The color surfaces and lines—originally geometrical frames,
developed in the past year to diagonal and curved lines—are the outcome of two reciprocating
scanners. The works are light-only photographs, devoid of matter, plot or subject; a visual mapping
of technical implementations, coordinates of dancing machines; strips of light from one scanner
received in another scanner and commanded by the artist/equipment operator in different time
points to be processed to a digital file. The scanning pace, determined by technical variables (such
as resolution) dictated by the operator, creates manipulations resulting in varied versions of
geometrical abstract in photography.
Shaham emphasizes the choosing and editing that are fundamental for photography. These
actions, he says, turn the photographer into a small-scale curator. Alongside photogram-style
photographs, created by direct photography of objects placed on color-reflecting surfaces,
Shaham presents a small reproduction of an anonymous photograph from Hiroshima, from a
20th-century photography journal—a tragic shadow-illustration of a figure and a ladder etched
onto a wall in Hiroshima, a result of the intense light and heat that accompanied the atomic
explosion. It is a stunning photogram with delicate outlines demonstrating the optics and
chemistry of photography through the physics of calamity.
Opposite the small image of Hiroshima that was imprinted with light and heat in the collective
memory card stands a huge image of an Ilford photographic paper package; the image in its
center, usually some impressive landscape or still life, has been replaced by Shaham with the
famous photograph of the rape-like photo shoot scene from Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “BlowUp.” In the photograph, blown up to immense size, Shaham implanted an image from this film
that deals with blowing up photographs in order to discover information obtained there without
the photographer noticing it on the scene. Through the relation between photographer,
photographed object and the event, and between an event and its appearance in the
photograph, the film deals with the relation between reality and subjective imagination and
hallucination, and doubts the photograph’s ability to represent anything beyond itself.
The photograph Shaham chose to implant at the center of the immensely blown-up envelope,
without losing its resolution, is taken from the violent photo-shoot scene at the studio, which
typically deals with the relation between photographer and photographed object, and not from
the scene dealing with blowing up the photographs. The essential theme emerging from those
long minutes when Thomas, Antonioni’s photographer, blows up the photographs he had taken
the previous day in the park, and discovers in them what he takes to be a murder plot, is the
elusive relation between the information in the photograph and what exists in reality. With his
camera Thomas rages and makes passionate love with Veruschka, the submissive model
hunched under him and surrendering to his harsh camera. Thomas soon thereafter faces the
photographed reality, as he tries to intensify photography’s enlarging properties and reaches a
void, the blurring created when the patches of information in the photograph expand to overlarge distances and white spaces erase the chance to understand the photographed from the
enlargement.
Almost fifty years after the photograph’s graininess dissipated to a pale haze in “Blow-Up,”