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Doron Rabina

To Hebrew Version

The discovery that that which is called "biography", or worse still "autobiography", is shed skin rather than skeleton – an enmeshed cover more productive to discard than wear, and in any case not the same element collected until unified, until solid, which we have grown used to imagining – is the key issue in Anna Yam's photographs. 

 

The photographs, with their accentuated auotobigraphical tone, create the "identity" a facade constructed as a sequence with no plot. The fragment, the partial, not enough on its own, is the most credible portrait of consciously letting go of your own life, and this portrait is drawn with a hand full of faith, yet devoid of godliness, in photographs, which seem to say: if you desire the feeling of continuous alienation, being but a stroke away, look at what is known as the story of your life (giving in to the fact that your life is "yours", for all claims of dominion attached to this use).

 

The photographs in the exhibition were taken in two geographical – biographical arenas, Russia and Israel, but these are not photographs of a journey in the sense of distancing from ones home, from the known – distance which will bring about self awareness, which will expose what is truly ours, after it has survived the ever changing time and place of a voyage. The photographs are photographs of fluctuation, between the familiar and the unfamiliar; between home (Israel) and home (Russia). The detachment , the colorful exotic otherness, are the tradition of a local Israeli view with which Anna Yam juggles using inaccessibility, through tension created in conjunction with imagery of otherness. In this case both the tourist for a moment and she who looks at the materials occupying her "life story" cannot see the end and work for lack of any other option the constant gap and the missing.

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