Dor Guez
Catástrofe
March - August 2022
MAMBO - Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá, Colombia
Catástrofe [Catastrophe] is the first South American solo exhibition devoted to the oeuvre of the Jerusalem-born artist Dor Guez, whose work tackles the relationship between art, narrative, and memory, exploring personal and public accounts of the past.
The exhibition's title Catastrophe is borrowed from the artist’s last series of works: monumental panoramic photographs of pine forests close to the city of Lydda. Planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), pine forests are perceived as part of the country's "natural" landscape but initially introduced to imitate the European landscape. They dramatically damaged the local ecosystem.
The exhibition displays two new video-based installations: Hippos (2022) and Colony (2021), as well as Guez's photographic series Lilies of the Fields (2019), alongside other seminal works. These works emphasize the relationship between colonialism and photography. They unpack how problematic the representation of landscape and vegetation can be if subjugated to Orientalist stereotypes and made to please a Western eye, style, and taste.
The trilogy of videos titled (Sa)Mira (2009), Watermelons under the bed (2010), and Sabir (2011) depicts three of Guez's relatives of the Palestinian side of his family. These works underline the uncomfortable situation of the Christian Palestinian community in Israel, a "minority within a minority."
