Dor Guez
Dor Guez’s work typically concerns his family, though it’s the leap from personal to larger narratives that gives it poignancy. Five years ago, Guez founded the Christian-Palestinian Archive, which he has developed into an ongoing project documenting the diaspora of this ethnic and religious minority in a digital collection of scanned photographs and documents culled through open calls. He never keeps the originals of the images he collects—those belong in family albums, he says—but the photographs in his latest exhibition hail from a drawer in his own grandmother’s kitchen.
40 Days, 2012, the sole piece on view in this exhibition, comprises a two-channel video and a photographic series. The video installation in the gallery’s main room offers a delicate portrayal of the months surrounding the artist’s grandfather’s death. In one scene, Guez’s grandmother tells the artist to fetch photos from a kitchen drawer. Taken by the grandfather over the years on his own initiative as evidence for the police, these images document the repeated vandalism of gravesites in the Greek Orthodox cemetery in the city of Lod, a center for Israel’s Christian Palestinian community. They have become stuck together from years of storage in heat and humidity; we see and hear her ripping the pictures apart. Another room in the gallery is dedicated to twelve “scanograms” of these destroyed photos. Guez used three separate scanners to re-create each picture: one for the depicted image, another for the tear, and a third to capture discoloration.
Forty days is the traditional period of mourning in the Greek Orthodox Church (to which Guez’s maternal family belongs). During the memorial service for his grandfather, the closing scene in the two-channel video, we see a Greek priest read from a sheet of paper held up by an anonymous hand that blocks his face. The priest doesn’t speak Arabic, and he does not know the community members’ names. His script is a haphazard piece of paper that embodies the powerlessness of the Christian Palestinian community as a marginalized double minority.
