The Heart of Darkness – Landscape Photography & Decolonial Practices
Colonnade House’s second gallery will host a solo exhibition by Gil Mualem-Doron. The exhibition, The Heart of Darkness – Landscape Photography and Decolonial Practices, presents collaborations with Palestinian communities and individuals uprooted from their village and land in 1948 and who have been internal refugees since then.
These projects were formed through conceptual and collaborative photography sessions, archival material and landscape photography. Using mixed media, photographic prints and video, they depict the remnants of the village and the landscape created to erase and council its existence.
Like photography, the landscape has little to do with anything “natural”. Colonial and racialised perspectives contaminate both concepts and practices. As such, “landscape” and the photograph or the photographic “subject” cannot be seen just as an exterior (terrain) but as a construction based on the obscurity or to be precise, the obscuring of interior foundations, which led to the creation of these concepts and practices. Linked to this understanding and to the practice of visualisation of one’s internal landscape (used by PTSD cases) – the exhibition includes a photography series of the first place Mualem-Doron remembered as a child – the bomb shelter in his parent’s building in Israel to which he had to run to in the 1973 War. It also includes a self-portrait, which relates in critical ways to the Balfour Declaration and its devastating impact on the Palestinian people and the Arab-Jewish or MENA Jewish communities.
These complex works, exhibited previously in several galleries and museums in museums and galleries in the UK, Israel-Palestine, South Africa and Brazil, give a glimpse into the groundwork underlying the physical, social and political landscape of Israel/Palestine and to the heart of darkness.
Saturday 19th October
Gil Mualem-Doron in conversation: Landscape Photography, socially engaged and decolonial practices – an event for Black History Month.
Dr Gil Mualem-Doron will be talking about his own photographic practice and the works in The Heart of Darkness and the connections of this work to the exhibition Outlooks on the English Countryside he curated. The exhibition tour and talk will centre around the use of landscape photography and socially engaged practices for unearthing buried histories and to highlight the presence of what has been counseled in Israel-Palestine and England.
Tuesday – Saturday // 10.00 – 17.00 (Closed Monday)