ALAIN BACZYNSKY
HATUFIM
Co-published by Silence Editions and ALMA ZEVI
Softbound, 14.5 x 21 cm
Texts in English, and Italian
350 copies
15 euros
Silence Editions and ALMA ZEVI are pleased to present Hatufim by Alain Baczynsky, published
Hatufim, a project started in 2013 and completed in 2019 is a series of eight photographic diptychs, each of which presents a portrait of a person, either composed from archival documents or taken in the artist’ studio, alongside a self-portrait by the artist. Whether archival images or recent works, the different portraits in the series were all carefully composed following the strict parameters commonly associated with deadpan passport or official identity photographs, showing a sitter facing the camera front-on with a neutral expression. The recurring image of the self-portrait has been subjected to the same manipulation eight times: Baczynsky (digitally) cut the eyes, and in some cases the eyebrows, of the facing portrait and pasted them onto his own. His eyes never appear.
Baczynsky enacts his own blinding, performing unsettling shifts of identity. He takes in turn the gaze of his grandfather, Rudolph Höss, his daughter, a Palestinian refugee, a young Israeli soldier, a new born baby, a nonagenarian Palestinian man, and a blind Ethiopian immigrant. It is through the repetitiveness of the motif of the artist’s self-portrait combined with the variation of the other subjects’ gazes that the viewer becomes aware that a series of uncanny juxtapositions are at play. If the style and format adopted by Baczynsky recalls a certain tradition of the photographic portrait (that can be traced back to August Sander’s People of the 20th Century and in its legacy on the Düsseldorf school in the 1990s), it also disrupts it. The experience of looking at Hatufim is interrupted by the realization of a double presence, of a breach in the representation of the artist’s identity – one that challenges the viewer to look at portraiture anew.
In Hebrew, Hatufim means ‘kidnapped’ or ‘abductee’ – words that in their etymologies refer to a state
where one is ‘pulled or led away’.
Alain Baczynsky, born in Brussels in 1953, lives and works between Jerusalem and Paris. He has developed a highly intimate photographic practice that often takes self-portraiture as its starting point. Baczynsky spends many years researching and completing each new series of photographs. His work has been shown at KANAL - Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018); Grand Palais, Paris (2016); Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne (2014); Kunst Haus, Vienna (2014); Hellerau, Europäisches Zentrum der Künste, Dresden, Germany (1995); and Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (1992). In 2012 his work Regardez, il va peut-être se passer quelque chose... was acquired by the Centre Pompidou (Paris).
For further information about the exhibition at Alma Zevi, click here
