EXHIBITION EXTENDED UNTIL APRIL 25, 2021
Home is the first retrospective devoted to the work of Assaf Shoshan (°1973), a photographer and video artist who lives and works between Paris and Tel Aviv. This unprecedented exhibition traces the thread of a sensitive and committed body of work, produced over a period of ten years between the Middle East and Europe, with Africa as a backdrop. After studying philosophy, Shoshan turned to photography, tirelessly probing the world through notions of territory, identity and belonging, beyond tangible borders. Inhabited by the theme of uprootedness, his work takes a subtle, delicate look at a wandering humanity.
Her landscapes and portraits evoke an ancestral longing, devoid of melancholy. His empathetic approach, both documentary and autobiographical, gives rise to enigmatic images halfway between reality and fiction. By putting the reality of today’s exiles into perspective, Shoshan evokes the history of the Jewish people, traversed by the exodus and the questions of abandonment and acceptance. But his obsession with the theme of exile also ties in with his own history: belonging to the third generation of Jewish exiles to settle in Israel, having himself chosen to live in a foreign land, Shoshan is intimately concerned with the question of attachment to a place. Based on the experience of a feeling of foreignness, the Israeli artist creates a unique visual work. He invents a poetics of clandestinity, driven by this question: to what territory should we devote ourselves in a world with blurred contours?
On view from October 7, 2020 to April 25, 2021 at the Jewish Museum of Belgium.
