1917, untitled #01 - Limited Edition of 5 Photograph

Orit Ishay 1917, untitled #01, 2012 still photography, archival inkjet print 135x100 cmnumbered and signed Edition: 5 +2AP Souvenirs are not unlike passports. They are more then just a thing, image or text. They are something you bring when you go somewhere. So they have a lot to do with a moment of passage. The passport allows you to pass into another country or prohibits you from doing so. The souvenir is what you take with you when you return from your travels. It shows that you passed through another country in the past, and thereby opens a passage in time back to the moment when you passed through that passage in space that your passport opened up. It shows what came to pass. And it permits you to pass that memory on to someone else, to the person to whom you give the souvenir as a present — or to the person, a stranger maybe even, who, perhaps entirely by chance, comes into the possession of the souvenir after you have passed away, leaving him or her with the evidence of a past passage, of which it might not even be clear where it led, but of which it can safely be said that it was undertaken. What to do with such a souvenir when you come into its possession by chance? Can the passage, once undertaken in the past, be repeated in the present? The place to which the passage led may after all still be there. What if that place were where you yourself live now? Then the souvenir is a door that leads to where your home is. It stands wide ajar. You recognize what it shows because it is where you are. But, even if you know you know the place the door opens onto, this still gives you no guarantee that you could actually pass through the passage in time and re-enter the place as it once was. In fact that place may have changed so much during the time that passed since the door was last opened, that the door no longer leads somewhere but nowhere, really. It's the weirdest thing when a souvenir, precisely because it evokes the past of a place so effectively, affects you with a sense of not knowing whether you can ever return to the place in the past in which you presently find yourself. It's unsettling enough to take a souvenir back to the place from which it came. Stranger even, if you find the souvenir in the country which it was from. Did it ever leave? Never leave? Or was it brought back by someone who decided to return? If so, is it some kind of homecoming then? Home to a land to which someone once travelled? Which ceases to be foreign upon the traveller's return? Or a land which seems ever more foreign because what the souvenir shows it once to have been it no longer is, now, that you find the souvenir there? I ask these questions in response to a series of photographs by Orit Ishay, "1917" (2011-2012). They show pages from a small book originally produced in 1917 to honour the British Army upon its conquest of the Holy Land, and intended to be offered as a souvenir. Each page is made up of a composition of local flowers or ferns, collected, dried and pressed flat on the paper. Most compositions are strictly ornamental, with fern leaves opening up in intricate patterns around flower petals, but one adds a cross made from what may be a type of grass, to assure the souvenir’s recipients, who may have been Mandate officials, British soldiers or occasional tourists to Palestine, that yes, indeed the country they visited is their holy land too. To say that Ishay's photos 'show' these floral compositions may not be enough, however. In re-photographing the pages, two-dimensional as they are, in close up, Ishay much rather re-produces, re-presents, re-articulates what they are. And as her large photographic prints considerably magnify the postcard-size pages, she renders every single detail of their composition not just visible, but hypervisible. The materiality of the dried flowers and ferns becomes so pronounced in the process of their being re-photographed and enlarged that in a strange sense the photograph seems as real, if not more real, than the original. When I saw them for the first time I took them for what they look like and looked at them as something composed for the camera, now, today, out of faded flowers, before I realized they were pictures of something other than themselves. Or are they? For that is the crux that Ishay's works frame so poignantly: When the souvenir was made, the images inside may have been born out of their maker's imagination, transforming reality into an ornament that, as an ornament, first and foremost speaks about its own form and composition. Yet, as artefacts produced in 1917, these compositions also document the historic political reality of a country under colonial rule, in which British subjects were offered things to remind them of where they had been. But did they ever grasp where they'd been? Was the country they ruled any more real in their understanding than a composition of flowers and ferns is to the viewer's eye today? It may have been as real as the flowers and ferns are. Because they are as real as the place was. And is. But they may also have been as unreal, or real, as a picture is to a man daydreaming. Did they ever see where they were? Do we see it now when we look at what undeniably are the material relics of a very particular moment of history? Their passports got them there. Their souvenirs should have gone back with them. The fact that at least one, the book from which Ishay took her shots, stayed behind, may therefore open a door to the Palestine that may once have existed in history, a place of many flowers. Or conversely show, that it was what the rulers at the time would have liked to imagine it to be, a composition to confirm their taste. So perhaps the door to a different future fell shut already back then, and the passage is closed. Or not. In which case the shapes of flowers and ferns which were there then, as they are there now, open a passage and with no passports required, make you pass over to the place that Palestine was and is. (Text by Jan Verwoert)

Photography:Digital on Paper

Artist Produced Limited Edition of:5

Size:39.4 W x 53.1 H x 0 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.