Against the Archive

The work Glass II (2011) by Moshe Ninio is relevant to the discourse Thomas Demand developed in relation to photographic evidence and yet it diverges from it. The work is a framed photograph of an empty glass booth: we see the booth from the inside out, and at the same time our sight is blocked by the white wall that is in front of the same glass booth. The rear frame of the booth’s opening corresponds to the frame of the print. The picture frame becomes the booth’s frame, the glass of the picture frame becomes the glass of the booth, and the wall on which the framed photograph is hung becomes the wall we see from the booth. The work is an empty mirror image of itself: a frame within a frame, a real glass pane in front of a reproduced glass pane, an imaginary wall on top of a real wall. But this object is not anonymous; it is historical evidence. It is the booth where Adolph Eichmann sat during his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. What we see in Ninio’s work is evidence (the photograph) of a piece of evidence (the booth) from a historical legal procedure that dealt with examination of evidence — a trial that triggered the question of witnessing. The fact that what we see in Glass II is associated with the evidentiality of history’s ultimate evil catastrophe re-exposes this empty non-image as an ultimate image, an ultimate reference. At the same time, this ultimate image is re-exposed as an empty mirror image of itself.

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