Fragments of Violent Memory: New Work by Nir Avissar

Opening Reception Friday, November 5, 6-8pm | Exhibition up through November 27, 2010

In May 2007, a decade after completing a three-year long obligatory military service in the Israeli army, Nir Avissar was drafted for nearly a month. Documenting this period with his camera enabled him to delve into several key aspects in the experience of army reservists. In Fragments of Violent Memory, he sought to explore how Israeli army reservists experience the abrupt removal from civic existence into a military one, which results in a loss of control over one’s present life. As the project unfolded, he realized that in partaking in military reserve duty one is forcibly propelled back in time, wherein his military past as a regular soldier exerts a violent control over his present experience as army reservist. The images in the project therefore deal with the contradictory—and yet complementary—conceptions of time among army reservists: historical consciousness on the one hand and memory on the other. Whereas the reservist’s historical understanding enables him to distinguish between past and present, his memory subverts this temporal boundary and fuses the two. Yet our diachronic grasp of time prevents past memories from fully merging with present experience. The violence of the past, then, only partly takes hold of the present, and thereby manifests itself as fragments, shards of the past.