Everywhere, Landscape and Memory in Israel 1998-2002
These photographs are not only records of particular places that signify landmarks in the history of Israel’s armed conflicts, but are also a testimony to spaces that Dominey and Lebée-Nadav traversed on the highways and byways to reach all these locations. Hence, this collection of photographs follows in part the genealogy of national heroes and famous battles. In doing so it makes us wonder about the type of journey we are being invited to join: at a time when the practices of subjective and collective memory are being questioned, we wonder whether the collection of these photographs of monuments
does not run the risk of complying with the State’s hegemonic view, which tries to create a national memory in order to represent a united society that has a singular linear historical development?
Or, is this project meant to have a critical and ironic outlook on the role that monuments play in Israel precisely because it presents a miscellany of styles of monuments that span more than 50 years of this country’s history? This project raises complex questions about the relationship between memory and history; memory and forgetfulness; subjective and collective practices of memory; and about the relationship between art and politics.
Meir Wigodar, from the paper “Looking at Remembering: Photography, Monuments and Memory”