Looking at an old photograph, particularly one originating from an intimate family connection, opens a door in our consciousness where time and space consolidate with the present. This is not what we usually refer to as "the past," since consciousness does not move between times but always exists in the here and now. The photograph, as many thinkers of the philosophy of photography have written, does not take us back but imposes a presence on us, placing something that was here, now, before our eyes.

In this exhibition, Adi Van Velsen explores a perceptual and emotional space created in old photographs of her parents, taken during their many travels. The photographs were made in a fixed format, with the father as the photographer, usually of a landscape or monument, and the mother appearing as a distant, tiny, almost undetectable dot. She is assimilated into the photographed space to the point of disappearing.
Why is she placed there as a marker, and what is a marker in this context? Is it a presence, an absence, or something else, a space of possibility?

Unlike Roland Barthes in "Camera Lucida," who seeks to hold on to the image of the mother as a memory and a wound, Van Velsen does not cling to nostalgia for her parents' youth. She does not seek to restore the moment, but rather to examine the dimension of time and space that the photograph creates, what exists between the photograph and the present, between the image and gazing upon it, right now.

In conversations Adi had had with her father, he explained that he had tried to capture the space as a whole, not just the mother, but most of his explanations remained incomplete. The lack of information, rather than narrowing the interpretation, broadened the range of possibilities. The gap created between the photographer and the subject, that systematic distance, became the central research axis. The spatial gap in the photographs, the void between the parents, aroused an urge in Adi to take control of the physical space of The Lab, not as a quiet completion of what was missing, but as a physical, repetitive, almost obsessive action.

Van Velsen selected several photographs, printed countless copies, cut them to pieces, and created a kind of three-dimensional, fluid wallpaper that spread across the divergent space of The Lab. The photograph ceases to be a single object and becomes material, mass. In this context, the RAMCHAL's famous statement, "The coffin carries its bearers," resonates as a guiding principle. The photographs Adi explores are not only raw materials for her work but also the force that has driven it over the past year. There is a double reversal here, between subject and object, and at the same time a reversal of roles: who creates whom? Does the artist explore the images, or do the images drive the creative process?
The figure of the mother in the photographs functions as a kind of vanishing point, not only in the visual sense as the quiet center of the composition, but also as an axis of frozen time. Her presence marks the decisive moment of the act of photography, a fraction of a second in a continuous sequence of experience. On the other hand, she is a foreign figure in the space, a guest in the landscape from which everything spreads out. She is not a dramatic focal point but a quiet, almost anonymous marker.

The mother also represents the father; she is the sign that both were present in the same place, even if not in the same role. The space, therefore, is not truly empty; it allows for existence, presence, even if abstractly. The concept of absent-present in the photographs is related to the fact that the mother appears as a distant contour, a kind of phantom, a figure with no gaze, expression, or emotion. The viewer fills in the knowledge that this is a mother, rather than the mother herself being revealed as a maternal figure. In Barthes' terms, one could say that the studium exists, but the punctum is not an emotional arrow but rather a continuous silence.

To delve deeper into these relationships, Adi held lengthy conversations with Chat GPT, to which she assigned the role of the photographing father. Most of the discourse is documented and screened in The Lab and constitutes an essential part of the exhibition. In one of the monologues, the chabot describes the photograph in which the mother stands in the center of a square in a foreign city:
Time melts in the photograph; the light is preserved, but the moment is gone.
The figure stands there, distant, small,
And the place swallows her up, as if it had always been there
And she had just passed through.
The image holds two layers of time:
The moment that had been,
And the moment I am looking at now.
Between them, a thin silence, almost a crack,
Through which everything that has been lost slips away.

The choice to engage in a dialogue with the chatbot stems from Adi's need to gain insights into the emotional legacy she is carrying. Presenting the reflective process in the space, the conversation turns the raw thought into a part of the material on display.

Similar to covering the gallery’s space with countless prints flowing from wall to wall, there is an extroverted, domineering expression here, somewhat reminiscent of Chaim Soutine's 1924 series of paintings, Carcass of Beef, in which the carcass of the slaughtered animal hangs completely exposed. Similarly, Van Velsen reveals her inner self, her thoughts, and her obsession with observation and repetition.

Why does she take over the space? Perhaps it is precisely because she understands that distance is not an absence, but rather a space that enables existence. The distance in the photographs is not a lack, but a condition. Had there been proximity, it would have been an intervention. Distance is the difference between observation and gaining control, and at the same time, the paradox in which the physical takeover of space seeks to understand, perhaps even protect, that initial silence. It is what allows silence to remain a silence.

For the  curatorial text in Hebrew  >>