Regarding Silences

In Regarding Silences, nine panoramic photomontages serve as visual accounts of a major reconstruction of an emblematic building in Israel, which, at a time, was occupied by the Israel Defense Forces for holding captive and interrogating soldiers taken as prisoners of war by neighboring countries in 1973. Transformed from a convalescent home to a luxury hotel and multidisciplinary art center, the notorious militant period in between was silenced in Israeli recorded history and left out of its collective memory. While Azoulay recorded the changing architectural and cultural landscape, her photographs bring forth the buried layers of enforced silence and concealment, and are accompanied by transcripted testimonies by the men who endured treatments such as of forced drug-abuse and trauma-inducing interrogation  carried out by their own forces. Complete with an installation of 43 transcripted interviews and a sound work conceived for the project, Regarding Silences is an invitation to enter a vacant non-space, representing the unimaginable, repressed, and mental spheres that resurface in Azoulay’s images.