Dictionary

In Asnat Austerlitz’s works, the purpose of photography—whether it is direct, appropriated, or digitally processed—is not to report on a transient reality but rather, and mainly, to engage in a multi-phased practice of cultural interpretation that is inseparably connected with the ontological status of the photograph as living-dead. The engagement with memory and death—cornerstones of Austerlitz’s practice—exists also in the works that Dictionary is composed of, these ideas abounding in the disguise of innocuous drawings, pastel colorfulness and terse compositions.
Dictionary is a troubling book that disrupts existing models and contemplates them with not only a critical awareness but also with a sense of immediacy and alarm, because the models that the project assimilates and deconstructs are those that lend structure to the artist and to ourselves as a society. The panic is unlikely to blow over quickly. Austerlitz confronts us with the familiar visual sphere as reflected in virtual space and printed newspapers as “Das Unheimliche”—“the uncanny,” in which defamiliarization masquerades as “sugar candy” and threatens to be a poisoned apple.
— Yael Guilat Ph.D.

Asnat Austerlitz is an Israeli artist born in 1969. Her works deal with the frailty of human existence, with violence and survival. They explore the tension between the digital and the material, and merge the political with the aesthetic. Austerlitz graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2004 (MFA) and her works appear in the collections of Tel Aviv Museum of Art and University College London.