This Place, Exhibition at Brooklyn Museum

This Place Explores the Complexity of Israel and the West Bank as Place and Metaphor through the Lenses of Twelve Highly Acclaimed Photographers. As artists around the globe become increasingly engaged with today’s pressing social and political issues, This Place presents works by twelve internationally acclaimed photographers who visited Israel and the West Bank in an unprecedented effort to offer twelve distinct photographic perspectives on the region. The exhibition is on view at the Brooklyn Museum from February 12 through June 5, 2016.. Conceived of by photographer Frédéric Brenner, This Place explores one of the most complex and contested regions in the world today through the eyes of Brenner (France), Wendy Ewald (U.S.), Martin Kollar (Slovakia), Josef Koudelka (Czech Republic), Jungjin Lee (South Korea), Gilles Peress (France), Fazal Sheikh (U.S.), Stephen Shore (U.S.), Rosalind Fox Solomon (U.S.), Thomas Struth (Germany), Jeff Wall (Canada), and Nick Waplington (United Kingdom). The participating photographers—none of whom are Israeli or Palestinian, and a majority of whom had never been to the region before—took up residency in Israel and the West Bank for an average of six months between 2009 and 2012. During that time, the artists traveled throughout the region and engaged with a remarkable variety of individuals and communities, focusing their lenses on the landscape, inhabitants, and daily life to provide an outside view of the histories and challenges of this fraught land. Each artist was free to pursue his or her own self-defined project, resulting in twelve original and strikingly different bodies of work and more than 600 photographs that combine to reveal the many rifts, dissonances, and paradoxes of Israel and the West Bank. According to Brenner, “It seemed to me necessary to gather a large spectrum of individuals whose origins, passions and paradoxical and contradictory perspectives could help us grasp the unbearable complexity of this place and its voices.” The group project that led to This Place echoes previous initiatives such as the 1935 commission of the U.S. Farm Security Administration, which gathered artists to use photography to ask essential questions about culture, society, and individual lives during the Great Depression, and La Mission photographique de la DATAR, which documented the French landscape of the 1980s. Unlike those precedents, however, This Place did not receive any government funding and all the artists were from outside the region. Brenner notes, “The viewer is asked to work, there are no resolutions, not for me and not for anyone. People will have to wrestle with the ideas of longing, belonging and exclusion.” “We believe art has the power to spark change, challenge conventions, and build bridges. The Brooklyn Museum is proud to host this internationally traveling exhibition, as it gives us all an opportunity to think anew about this historic region of the world,” says Anne Pasternak, Shelby White and Leon Levy Director. This Place will be accompanied by an exhibition catalogue as well as companion books featuring each photographer’s work. The Museum will also host a series of public programs and community events exploring how artists around the globe are taking on difficult subjects in an effort to help us see our times from fresh and unusual perspectives.