ללא כותרת, 2010, הדפסת פיגמנט ארכיונית
Curriculum Vitae
Mark Yashaev
Curator: Sagit Zaloof-Namir
10 Sep — 22 October, 2011
Second exhibition in the 17th Nidbach series
The first encounter with Mark Yashaev’s photographs arouses feelings of warmth, intimacy and closeness. They are like a reunion with a new, colorful and spectacular family – the beginning of a journey to a near-far land.
In coping with the paradox of a distant intimacy that Yashaev skillfully creates, fundamental questions come up, questions of memory and awareness; the indexical uniqueness of the photography medium, enables us to face reality and make it eternal, to convert a life story into fragments of memory. This is the power and purpose of the camera – to realize the basic human need to immortalize. Yashaev, a magician of time, looks at the present, casts the past into it, and preserves it for the future. However, instead of commemorating an actual life’s history, his photographic moment leaves the viewer empty handed.
The people photographed, as is Yashaev, are at the same time present and absent, they seem to be disappearing, as if they are part of a distant memory: childhood, home, parents, objects and smells. All are there, yet gone. Erased and evasive – just like memory itself, they exist and at the same time are unreal.
Sagit Zaloof-Namir