The maps gained’t let you know the place you might be in Dor Guez’s new solo exhibition at Berlin’s Carlier | Gebauer gallery, so don’t hassle looking for a due north. The one directive is the exhibition’s title—Not realizing is an efficient place to begin.
“We will acknowledge the topography—we see the timber, valleys, rivers, and mountains—however we don’t know the place we’re and no index to assist us. And this actually highlights the significance of ‘not realizing,’ which is completely different from missing info,” Guez informed ARTnews of his 2023 work Amid Imperial Grids, a print sequence of manipulated maps that take away all human markers (comparable to border strains or city names) and are reshaped as circles. The maps have been initially exhibited final yr at Felix Nussbaum Home, a museum in Osnabrück, Germany housing the works of the German-Jewish surrealist. They have been meant as a response to Nussbaum’s 1939 portray The Refugee, which features a globe lacking geopolitical demarcations, referencing his incapacity to seek out refuge in Nazi Europe.
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“What you see is data in itself, as one can establish the uncooked topography; it’s simply that you just don’t have many instruments to course of that info into data or knowledgeable judgement,” Guez mentioned.
An openness to not realizing is central to the observe of Guez, a Jaffa-based artist born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian Christian mom and father of Jewish Tunisian descent. His work typically facilities his circle of relatives and bigger untold histories. Within the present exhibition at Carlier | Gebauer, Guez’s first for the reason that October 7 Hamas assault, he presents works created over the previous yr that inform a fancy story of displacement and compelled migration.
Above the disorienting maps, that are put in on the ground, is an ongoing photographic sequence of suitcases that belonged to immigrants and refugees. Guez started this sequence with the suitcase that his grandmother, Gina, used when immigrating from Tunis to Israel within the Nineteen Fifties. The household left with no matter prized possessions they may match into one suitcase per individual, after they’d been compelled into work camps in the course of the Nazi occupation of Tunisia. Guez additionally associates the picture of a timeworn suitcase with the story of his maternal grandparents, who hid within the basement of a church in Lydda in 1948 as their property was nationalized by the brand new state of Israel.
An set up view of Dor Guez’s “Not realizing is an efficient place to begin” at carlier | gebauer in Berlin.
Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid; Photograph © Andrea Rossetti
These suitcases are actually unfolded and unpacked, now not appropriate containers however weathered testaments to journeys long gone. Guez images all six sides of the suitcases after which stitches them into composite photographs that resemble templates or ground plans, photographs which are optically unimaginable in actuality. Every {photograph} is printed to the precise dimension of the suitcase, permitting viewers to learn each stamp and label and picture what may match inside.
“The thought of leaving and migrating in haste, hurriedly, realizing that you just’re not going to return and taking what you possibly can bodily carry with or in your physique—considering of the restricted quantity of what you possibly can take with you, what’s necessary and what isn’t—is a query that occupies me in a lot of my works and in addition on this exhibition,” Guez mentioned.
A brand new sequence debuted within the exhibition is Khobiza, the Arabic phrase for edible mallow crops that develop wild within the area. Usually harvested and eaten throughout occasions of shortage, comparable to battle, khobiza actually means ‘bread’ in Arabic and refers to its position as a supply of sustenance. After not working in any respect in the course of the first few months of the battle, Guez started making this photographic sequence in late winter, when khobiza have been in season and after studying that his prolonged household in Gaza was harvesting and consuming it.
Botany is a continuing theme in Guez’s work, and in his 2019-2021 sequence Lilies of the Subject, he studied and photographed the early twentieth century pressed-flower albums created by the American Colony in Jerusalem. Guez had meant to dry the foundation, stem, and leaves of the mallow crops between sheets of white urgent paper, like botanical specimens, however on the final minute determined to freeze the method on the fragile second earlier than a residing plant turns into historical past. His Khobiza float between the milky papers, both coming towards the viewer or receding into the white. Just like the suitcases, the khobiza are printed to precise dimension and look so actual {that a} viewer is more likely to be uncertain whether or not there are crops behind the frames.
Dor Guez, Nest, 2024 Dry twigs, 2024; Biblical Dictionary in Hebrew and Aramaic, 1977
Courtesy of the artist and carlier | gebauer, Berlin/Madrid Photograph; © Andrea Rossetti
Perched above the floor-installed maps, the Khobiza sequence, and Suitcase No. 2 and Suitcase No. 3 is Nest, a literal chook’s nest that wild pigeons made on prime of a red-bound e-book in Guez’s studio. This weird readymade intuitively mirrors and connects the works within the present: the spherical form of the maps, the harvested twigs, and the try to discover a residence.
The e-book that’s the nest’s basis—chosen by the pigeons not for any philosophical cause, after all, however as a result of it’s the fattest e-book in Guez’s library—is a translated Biblical dictionary of phrases in Hebrew and Aramaic. A translated dictionary is, by definition, a submission to ‘not realizing.’
“To make artwork, to attach with somebody who could also be completely different from you—whether or not in language, tradition or beliefs—that you must put aside your prejudices,” Guez mentioned. “Embracing that sense of disorientation can truly information you on the correct path in the direction of this individual.”
Guez deliberately averted exhibiting his work till now, canceling or suspending reveals that have been deliberate earlier than October. Now he’s getting ready to exhibit a number of occasions within the coming yr: in a gaggle exhibition at K21 museum in Germany, a solo present at Goodman Gallery in New York, a gaggle present at Goodman Gallery’s Capetown outpost, and participation in a biennale in South America.
When requested why he opted to not publicly share his work for the reason that battle began, Guez mentioned, “I felt that as my work challenges definitions, identities, and ideas of nationalism, it isn’t the correct second for it. It seems like there is no such thing as a room for ‘not realizing’. My type of artwork can not thrive in an setting the place listening is absent. My work doesn’t exist to show whether or not somebody is correct or mistaken—that’s not my position.”
“It’s not that I imagine we’re in a interval of listening proper now, both,” Guez added. “Nonetheless, I realized that selecting silence isn’t essentially a greater possibility.”