Transmigration of the Soul, Рамат-Ган, до 11 декабря

"Seven lean years" of global pandemic, massacre, and war provide the backdrop to Amira Ziyan’s engagement with "reincarnation." In a time of existential uncertainty, she continues to create, and in her works dread seeps into beauty, death into life, and life into death.

The exhibition engages in "Nutuk" (نُطّق), meaning "speech." According to Druze belief, while the body perishes, the soul is eternal and wanders between bodies. Evidence of this phenomenon comes mostly from young children who recall memories, names, and places from other lives. Their testimonies intersect principles of spirit and matter, life and death. Ziyan does not record the conversations in a documentary manner but rather paints through the camera, as she explains, "the echoes of these conversations and what they etched in my soul. Each portrait is a poetic testimony to memory that is not written but is nevertheless deeply engraved in flesh and soul."

In a traditional Druze society where women do not photograph and are not photographed, Ziyan’s pioneering photography itself becomes a "reincarnation." The long exposure echoes layers of time and memory, blurring the boundary between revelation and concealment, the visible and the obscure.

Photography as "reincarnation" embedded with covert movement receives full expression in this exhibition through Ziyan’s first video work, displayed on three screens. The new work is a gateway to an additional path of medial practice in Ziyan’s pursuit of ways to express hidden memory and the growing soul. "I am not looking for evidence and I don’t know if this is truth or imagination, but one thing is clear to me: there are marks the body carries even when logic struggles to contain it. And there are souls that simply refuse to forget."