“And if There is no Sea, There is no Boat” is a group exhibition that initiated various encounters of humans and non-humans across the planet. It shifts focus between lushly green environments bursting with vegetation fed from abundant running water to the arid and sunbaked desert plains. It swings between actual growth and economic growth. This is an exhibition that deals with the aesthetics of mass extinction.
Curator: Ran Kasmy-Ilan

*The name of the exhibition was taken from the poem “Ze Mikvar”, published in the book “Tzror Shirim Gnuzim” (2019) by Hakibutz Hameuchad Publishing.

Yam used her own family albums and those of others to create the series. Photographs were selected and paired. Perusing albums of various families reveals one unavoidable fact: everyone created the same albums, and wherever they were—everyone had the same expeirnces. Each photograph in the series presents a single figure or a couple against a natural backdrop.
The visual display of a person at the forefront of nature is a cliché of many variations: a long-established geshtatlt based entirely on the romantic notion that we are separate from nature. It serves as scenery, a code embedded in the photographic act even prior to its execution, a pre-ordained fantasy. Nature and people are subject and object. Master and minion. We cast ourselves into a familiar image, fixing our viewpoint, veryfing our place. The site ceases to exist. It remains only within the confines of a white-edged rectangle. We were there.

Image: Anna Yam, Untitled, 70x100cm, 2011.