Collaborators

Although the starting-point of the collaboration between Merav Shinn Ben-Alon and Ram Samocha is the work of the individual, it appears that the prolonged and intimate dialogue between the artists has created a kind of attentiveness that is unique in the local context. This is an attentiveness to layered processes of slow and incessant, masculine and feminine, mental and physical change, and a struggle with an identity that becomes blurred and is built anew. For both artists, the engagement with the body, with anxiety and pain, is conducted from a standpoint of intimacy that facilitates a direct and sober contemplation of what is interiorized in the features of the body that remembers—in scars, in balding, in absence. The traumas of the body are mundane, banal, lacking in pathos, and the constant wondering about the body’s transformations with its layered aspects is an inseparable part of the dynamics of life.

In the book that they created together the intricate connection that has been built between the artists’ works over the years, a subtle yet essential distinction between the different (and at times polar) character of their individual bodies of work has not become dimmed.
—Galia Bar Or