Yael Eylat Van-Essen PhD – Curator / Researcher

Dana Arielli’s “Phantoms” project is concerned with ghosts – entities void of concrete existence who live on only in our minds. Paradoxically, the products of this project are photographs of concrete objects and sites documented by her camera. But the photographic deed exceeds the documentary as it is commonly found; through the act of taking photographs Arielli experiences, feels and charges her vision with aesthetic values, and simultaneously acts as an historian who examines the photographed realities reflexively.

This exhibition is the product of Arielli’s journey tracking the relics of totalitarian regimes in Europe – remnants left behind by the Third Reich and by Soviet regimes in regions governed by the USSR until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Begun as an historical study two decades ago, the journey has continued as a photographic one in the past eight years. The exhibition brings together Arielli’s modes of reflection, which shape a complex and singular vision.

In the exhibition’s central space, photographs that present divergent view points are hung side by side, inviting the viewer to shift between different time frames. The photographic gaze collapses the time gap between the photographed present and the period when these sites and objects were loaded with historical significance.  This gaze reflects an endeavor that is bound to fail – the attempt to tangibly experience the elusive past.  Conversely, the photographs offer a gaze that suspends time while displaying the gap between remnants of domination, power and oppression and the mundane, lusterless, pedestrian activity at these often neglected sites. This gap is expressive of the conflict that surrounds the role of these sites in shaping the experience of contemporary reality. In this way Arielli examines societies undergoing transformation, societies that must come to terms with their past under the aegis of various apparatuses of memorialization, erasure and embedding employed by their current political culture.

In the gallery’s inner space we find interviews and stills that relate to five sites connected to Germany’s Nazi past and representing the historical research that Arielli had undertaken along with her photographic essay.  These offer historical context for the photographic subjects and introduce many ethical questions regarding the documentation and preservation of these relics. Through an approach that encompasses both the institutional and the personal, the works bring the issue of the gaze to the fore, and examine photography’s constitutive role in the formation of mental perceptions and constructs. (constitutive influence on mental perceptions ad constructs.)

Arielli’s photographs deal with the aesthetics that accompany power and evil, with the politics of totalizing structures, the mechanisms of glorification and the disruptions they elicit. The photographs evoke the tension between present and absent, charged and incidental, externalized and recognizable vs. internal and lyrical, and between the gaze that captures surfaces and processes of historical interpretation. These are poetic photographs that sometimes touch on abstraction. They are accessible, seemingly overt, seductive; they engage in playful interaction with the history of art; they are intriguing.  Arielli returns to the “scene of the crime” in an attempt to let the camera capture what can no longer be seen.  She thus makes the horror and dread buried in these sites all the more palpable.