Coming days after the Israeli cabinet’s vote to require non-Jews seeking citizenship to affirm Israel as a Jewish state, Dor Guez’s artist’s talk on the occasion of his first major European exhibition proved critical to understanding the significance of his work. Even as the Jerusalem-born artist declared his video- and photography-based project to be more historical than political, the audience’s impassioned engagement with questions of identity politics that evening confirmed that a part of this work’s power lies in its capacity to stir conversation and debate. In tracing a narrative of the 1948 Israeli occupation of the Palestinian city of Al-Lydd (since renamed Lod) and its aftermath, the exhibition explored the complex history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of the town’s Arab Christian minority, through the testimonies of three generations of Guez’s own family.

The talk was crucial because the artist’s remarkably unremarkable aesthetic subdues the inherently explosive nature of his subject. The spare domestic interiors in which he conducts most of his interviews, for example, emphasize the everydayness of this experience of living between multiple cultures and maintaining incongruous affiliations. Though one might expect these stories of never quite feeling at home within Israeli society to trigger an empathetic response, most of them are surprisingly unaffecting. Guez’s grandfather—who, in July 13, 2009, matter-of-factly describes the day the nascent Israeli Defense Force invaded Al-Lydd—admits a conscious intention to remain unsentimental. Evidently habituated to the changes in the conditions under which he lives, he avoids political disputes even as he retraces his personal history through the places in the former Palestinian ghetto—including the Greek Orthodox Church—where he and his family were forced to live for years following the invasion. The same reserve is evident in Al-Lydd, 2010, a suite of black-and-white snapshots of barely extant traces of the pre-1948 city. Those images of empty lots, whose significance is no longer evident without the details in Guez’s gallery brochure, point to the apparent impossibility of preserving a culture at odds with official state history. In “Scanograms #1,” 2010, Guez plays down the intimate qualities of a set of family photographs documenting the dispersal of his grandmother’s family in the Palestinian diaspora by exhibiting digitized copies, of uniform size and shape, rather than the creased and torn originals. Images that in another context would be a sentimental record of weddings and other private occasions are instead a muted array of unfamiliar faces.

The show was not uniformly opaque, however; interviews with younger relatives offered glimpses of the precarious matter of identity. In recounting an episode of workplace prejudice triggered by her (non-Jewish) name, Guez’s bright-eyed cousin Samira emotionally describes the conflict between her Israeli self-identification and how others perceive her. Such moments of private revelation were nevertheless the exception; the tendency to avoid emotional engagement points to an uncomfortable contradiction in Guez’s work. In deflecting any close identification between the viewer and his subjects, he suggests the impossibility of a comprehensive grasp on such a convoluted situation. But perhaps by approaching the story from multiple angles and through varying mediums, he makes it possible to begin to understand this place. Like the conflicted state of affairs from which it stems, his work resists straightforward interpretation, placing definitive resolution just out of reach.

—Margaret Ewing