Yemima Ergas Vroman / A Retrospective Gaze: 1971 – 2021

Surveying the chapters of Yemima Ergas’s oeuvre, one may be frustrated in attempting to find footholds or any extensive chronological-historical narrative, by which to roam its realms. The flow of her work subjects, her mastery and skillful oscillation between different styles, her striving for perpetual experimentation as a way of life and as a modus operandi, does not allow for a distinctly linear sequence, but an existence, chaotic at times, determined to reject any attempt to enforce an orderly thematic structure or a restraining form on it.

True to this work mode, yet ready for the establishment of a retrospective exhibition, Ergas summons another gaze into the exhibition spaces. Weaving the a-priori and a-posteriori together, she proposes a reading of the exhibition sequence that merges the gaze forward with the gaze back, and maps the interwoven temporal and spatial axes as conduits of memory between these poles. A personal story, a family portrait, and cultural-social-political perceptions, come together to form a highly expressive visual memoir, which summons the “distant” to be looked into “closely.”