Alexandra Dvorkin

Home Exile Home

"Exile" in different languages is a word with several meanings. Inter alia, it describes a situation in which a person is displaced from his homeland and it also constitutes a philosophic metaphor for human existence. This word evokes a wide range of emotions associated with a search for a home and belonging in the emotional sense. The search, or to be precise, the journey for finding the belonging connects events of the past and the present. The past contains the feelings of security and satisfaction, even if they didn’t really exist. In the present - the search and the hope of finding a home. The project actually started with thoughts about the future. In the kibbutz, where I spent a few months last year, while wandering with a camera, I imagined my future home. I aspired to end a long period of alienation. During that time, I was exposed to Israeli photography magazines from the 1960s. I was drawn into the world of photographs and suddenly felt an inexplicable nostalgia for those times. Thinking of the desire to go back in time and close a circle of search, I incorporated them into the work. According to studies, such nostalgia characterizes an entire generation of which I am a part. The project contains two parts. The part of the "future" contains images I photographed in the kibbutz with an analog camera. The part of the "past" includes crouped images from the magazines I mentioned. The recurrence of the photographed objects, the shapes, the old nature of the images cause the past and the future to merge and intensify the tension between the two.