Miki Kratsman | All About Us
An Exhibition at the Ursula Blickle Foundation
March 5 – April 17, 2011
Curator: Nicolaus Schafhausen, director, Witte de With,
Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam
Opening Event: Saturday, March 5, 2011, 7 p.m.
Miki Kratsman, born 1959 in Argentina, immigrated to Israel in 1971 where he has been living in Tel Aviv since. His photographs are regularly published in the Israeli daily newspaper “Haaretz” in the rubric “The Twilight Zone”. Since 2006, Kratsman has been directing the photography course at the renowned Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Miki Kratsman’s photographs document the development of the Israeli-Palestine conflict and its consequences on the daily life of the civil population, whose everyday life has been marked by oppression for decades. Through his work as a press photographer over the past 20 years, Kratsman has gained access to locations that are normally unapproachable for the public in Israel and that are generally completely unknown to the international media. Whereas at first journalistic documentation was at the foreground of his work, Kratsman is today primarily interested in “shooting images of everyday life” that show people in an emotional interaction within complex reality, which is shaped by ever-new forms of violence, caused by the politics of colonies, but also by hope.
“All about us” at the Ursula Blickle Foundation is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. In addition to Miki Kratsman’s comprehensive archive, the exhibition focuses on new work that selects the Bedouin population as a central theme. The Bedouin – a minority of the Arabic minority in Israel – have attracted increasing interest in the last years, both from the media and from state-run institutions. The process of integration of the Bedouin into Israeli society occurs on two levels – the formal one, i.e. through governmental policy, and the informal one, i.e. through changing relations with Israeli society in general and Jewish society in particular. The process is marked by a number of conflicts within this cultural group: The transition from a traditional, conservative society of the Bedouin – who until one generation ago lived a nomadic life – towards an urban way of living and the orientation within power structures, the very opposite of a nomadic tradition. This creates new forms of poverty and criminality and means at the same time abandonment of values, customs and their previously self-contained economic system. The sensation of deprivation often yields objective problems and conflicts that bring with them dramatic socio-political changes. As in his earlier series, Kratsman established close relationships with the people he portrays.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue.
Authors: Nicolaus Schafhausen, Vanessa Joan Müller, Raphael Zagury-Orly, Dana Arielli
Ursula Blickle Foundation
Mühlweg 18, D-76703 Kraichtal-UÖ
Phone +49 7251 60919, Fax +49 7251 68687
