Homeland

In her Homeland project, Nurit Yarden seeks to examine the penetration of visual, social, and political signs into the Israeli public sphere. She invents a lexicon of sorts, yet it is not a standard one arranged alphabetically, in a seemingly objective manner, according to key terms, seeking to codify and determine that worth recording.
This “lexicon” offers a structure whose definitions do not sit comfortably within key terms and a central, organizing and guiding logic; one that does not neuter the antagonistic element. It is a wandering journey, journalistic and political at once.
In Yarden’s photography the pictorial “high art” is embedded in the guise of the “low” snapshot genre, creating a unique hybrid that offers numerous transgressions and possibilities for visual, social, cultural, and political deviations.
Nurit Yarden’s Homeland is an absurd lexicon that serves as a structure containing multiple contradictions, both as a reality image reflection and as a work practice that attends to apparatuses of seeing, habit, and denial. This crafty form of conceptualization in the current project emphasizes the reflective, conceptual, and critical dimension of her entire oeuvre.
--- Galia Bar Or