Over the past decade, I have been photographing the Israeli public space. The desire to get to know the society in which I live and better understand how the public space reflects it led me to initiate Sojourn: An ongoing independent residency project, which started in December 2015 and has no end date. As part of this platform, three times a year I travel to a place I have not been to, for a week. I find a contact who helps me get a modest place to stay and connects me with some local social activists. I schedule meetings with them over the first three days of my stay, learn about the place, write a diary and add quotes from these conversations. The rest of the time – I take pictures.

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The goal is to stay at all types of communities, from all sectors. So far, I have stayed in sixteen townships: Arad, Kibbutz Bar’am, Ma’alot-Tarshiha, Mitzpe Ramon, Isfiya, Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Old Akko, Moshav Ma’ale Gamla, Shfar’am, Moshav Timorim, Kfar Tavor, Eilat, Kibbutz Kfar Aza, Metula, Efrat, and Jerusalem’s Katamonim neighborhood.

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In 2020, I created an ongoing digital library on my website. Each residency has its own book, featuring quotes from my conversations with the local people and my photographs. The quotes are the voice of the local residents and serve as the documentary aspect of the piece. The texts foreground the complexity of Israeli society, while the photos reflect my own personal impression of the place. It is the combination of the two that makes the whole.

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In May of this year, I stayed in Jerusalem’s Katamonim neighborhood. The visual and textual materials are presented in this solo exhibition at Teddy Gallery, a walking distance from the neighborhood.

This is the first time I exhibit materials from the Sojourn project in a physical display space.

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Curator: Tamar Gispan-Greenberg