Day’s End | Exhibition in the 25th Nidbach Series

When we talk about staged photography, we tend to think of sets, performative action, and preconceived drama. In Noga Davis’s work, staging operates differently: not as an invention of an alternative world, but as a mechanism of suspension, allowing reality to emerge without being fixed on a single meaning. Rather than imposing a story, it seeks to sustain, momentarily, a fragile state already underway.

Family ties are present in the works as a continuous gaze, reinforcing the tension between intimacy and exposure. The figures are close to the lens, yet maintain a certain distance. The viewer is not invited to solve a mystery, but to be absorbed into an emotional state. The images hold an internal tension, refusing to yield to rapid interpretation.

Photography takes place in confined, everyday spaces, which do not readily produce drama. It is there, through Davis’s precise gaze that simple details, such as a wall, a window, a curtain, a plant, a body, and movement, take on a new presence. The encounter between the simplicity of the space and the acuteness of the gaze spawns a sculptural quality.

The exhibition opens with a large-scale photograph showing a figure running from left to right across a rocky slope. The work’s dimensions create a cinematic allusion, evoking a screen. The image echoes various traditions of running as a charged action, between an outburst of youth and cinematic freedom, and a moment of liberation that comes to a dead end, as in the final scene of François Truffaut’s film, The 400 Blows. For Davis, running is also a tribute. The viewer’s body is guided by the figure’s running direction, moving inward with it into the exhibition space, as if entering a long shot, a panorama. The presence of the image introduces the exhibition as a space read while walking, through orientation, via transitions between images that form a trajectory that is not entirely linear, but carries a subtle circularity.

Tomer Kep

Events in the exhibition:

• Tuesday 17.3 at 5pm | Gallery talk with Noga Davis & Tomer Kep  – postponed

• Saturday 11.4 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Noga Davis & Tomer Kep – postponed

• Tuesday 28.4 at 5pm | Gallery talk with Noga Davis & Tomer Kep
• Saturday 23.5  at 12pm | Gallery talk with Noga Davis & Tomer Kep