Moshe Ninio 'Lapse' at Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in Paris

 

This push generates an oscillation between the process of becoming and the state of being an image. The exhibition centres on two bodies of work by the Tel Aviv-born artist, Glass (2010-11) and Morgen (2015-16). Glass is a sequence of framed photographs that render successive versions of one image: as a pair of colour prints (Glass 1), as a single colour print (Glass IT) and as a single black-and-white print (Glass III). The image depicts an empty glass booth in front of a white wall. It is like a model of its own means of display: the frame of the booth's opening optically corresponds to each photograph's real frame, the represented glass pane of the booth to the real glass pane, and the represented wall to the real wall upon which the prints are hung. Yet in addition to its mute, anonymous visibility, Glass's image of the empty booth, as all photographic images, is an index of historical time and place. The booth is not just any booth, but the one Adolf Eichmann sat in during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Therefore the image of Glass is itself evidence of a historical legal procedure that triggered the question of witnessing and representing. In this sense, the movement of Glass's sequence between colour and black-and-white prints reflects a movement of photographic images between the space of art and the archive, between subjective expression and objective information.