Ilit Azoulay: QUEENDOM. Navigating Future Codes

Ilit Azoulay (1972 Jaffa, IL – Berlin, DE) is an Israeli artist with Moroccan roots. In her interdisciplinary artistic practice, she breaks with the traditional single-lens perspective of the camera and recomposes images based on extensive research data. She poses questions about the mechanisms of historiography, cultural appropriation, and practices of empathy.

Ilit Azoulay casts off the restrictions of national and male representations and opens pathways into an interconnected Middle East where identities are fluid and complexities appreciated. The Queendom, reigned by art, seems to have risen out of a total system crash. It is a rhizomatic realm derived from the future, where stories from different times and origins coalesce. Panoramic photomontages – based on the archive of David Storm Rice (1913–1962), a scholar of medieval metal vessels of Islamic art – present a symphony of fracture and healing, while an audio work fills the venue with sounds of a universal language, created in collaboration with the Palestinian healer Maisoun Karaman (1962 Haifa, IL). The artist uses digital craftwork to visualize the afterlife of images and their transformations, accentuating histories of appropriation and missing links in their geographies of knowledge. The ten panels of Queendom are supplemented for the first time by the inclusion of Ilit Azoulay’s personal, extensive archive.