Yigal Feliks is an artist who pays attention to his environment: to the inhabitant, people, the city or the countryside; he watches, documents, but when necessary, he retouches, smoothes things over in order to stress or exaggerate the way he looks at things.
Critical or utopian look?
Yigal Feliks tries to understand his Israeli environment and his Israeli identity by offering viewers a spotlight on the present with the ulterior motive that his country is in an ever changing state and that the reality evolves constantly. He is conscious of this issue and of the complexity of the country from a political and social point of view.
One of the places he has chosen to study is the centre of Jerusalem; a place of cohabitation, crossroad and passage where believers (from three monotheist religions) and laymen, new immigrants and old inhabitants, heterosexuals and homosexuals seem to rub shoulders peacefully (series Jerusalem Show). The photographer has deliberately ignored the bomb attacks that have hit the centre and the tensions that pervades there because he is interested in the human dimension.
Men and women mix also to the urban and rural landscapes during his travel between Jerusalem and Haifa (series 1,2,443). The people, captured by the objective of the photographer, form the Israeli mosaic in the present but he makes a veiled reference to the past through a passage in the historical sites, which symbolise the birth of the state. The pictures suggest that in order to understand the present we have to delve into the past.
This present time is translated by Yigal Feliks in the shot of his neighbourhood (series Communal Living Spaces). It concerns a new middle-class neighbourhood where all inhabitants live under the same conditions and according to the same architectural model. Does the photographer learn to reconcile with this model? Does he accept his present and his daily reality that he documents?
Yigal Feliks is born in 1979 in Jerusalem, B.F.A, Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem.
Exhibition curated by Muriel Sabbah et Eran Gutterman
