Land Research Project | 2005-Ongoing

Israeli based photographer and lecturer Yuval Tebol's "Land Research", is a decade long photographic journey through the landscape of Israel. Since 2005, he has been conducting a visual and thematic research of the internal conflict in Israel, from the West Bank and Jordan's Arava desert through Jerusalem to the Gaza envelope settlements. The work on the second part of "Land Research " project began in 2014 when he set out to research ways of seeing, and the nature of observation. Photographing solely with an analog medium format camera and black and white film, Tebol created a series of triptychs and tetraptychs. "Land research is a private journey. It examines the boundaries of time and space, internal and external, memory and imagination, conceptual and abstract, complete and disassembled, in the regions and borders of the land of Israel and the West Bank. I raise and break down questions using the complex and delicate tool of photography." (Tebol, 2016) The scenery in Tebol's work is one of Israel's collective memory and identity as well as his personal projection onto the world. Traveling from border to border, seeking traces of warfare and militarism, depicting wounded and scarred landscapes, deprived of human presence other than the traces we left after the drama subsided. The images he creates have a quality of heterotopias. Non -places with a vague air of holiness, territories that exist nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Functioning as an anthropologist or historian, researcher and archivist, he ponders on the line drawn between fine art and documentation, on the building blocks of collective memory, on the boundaries of crisis, on the internal and external relationships that define these spaces. Tebol photographs with obsession. Returning repeatedly in a post-traumatic way to reunite with the unconscious, the anxiety, the violence, the trauma of death. Deconstructing and reconstructing, he frees himself from the hermetic boundaries of memory and reality, remapping the past and through that - the present and future. Tearing down and rebuilding the image, laying down new mechanisms of order and control, new spaces of external observation and internal nature, in a never-ending journey towards catharsis. Sofie Berzon MacKie, Photography Curator September 2017