Mother tongue
(‘Reading from: Desert’)
Series of processed photographs.
`Mother Tongue` exhibition’ 2002.
Ein Harod Museum.
curator: Tal Ben Zvi
Technique: ink printing of self photography on paper, tracing the outline of the printed image with pastels.
From the book “Mother Tongue” text by Tal ben zvi:
“The artist presented 16 works in which her likeness appears. Making the work entailed photographing herself using the screen of a digital camera, printing the photographs with an inkjet printer, and drawing on them with colored pencils. The retouching covers the photograph in an attempt to emphasize the contours of her face and body. The artist begin with the eyes, moves to her cheekbones, then to her wrinkles and laugh lines, and finally to her lips. She render her expressions more severe, tries to extract a new person, to release herself from her physicality. Photographing herself by facing “movement’ expresses a kind of distancing of speech. The work bespeaks a lack of faith in existing systems of signs; an attempt to invent a language through gestures. It is physical language that corresponds with, as well as confronts, a conception of Mizrahiness project onto the body, hand jesters, and animated expressions of emotions. Shoshan’s body turns into a political battlefield in the struggle between control and containment on the one hand, and integration and liberation on the other.”
