A House Without a Roof
2016
Published by Booklyn Press, New York
168 pages
In English, Hebrew and Arabic
Edited by Janna Dyk & Gabriela Vainsencher
Art Direction & Design by Ghazaal Vojdani
A House Without a Roof is a photographic book and installation of images and texts which looks at the deeply intertwined histories of violence and displacement connecting Europe to Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Between 2011 - 2016, I photographed and conducted fieldwork in the Baltic States, Britain, Germany, Israel, and the Occupied West Bank. I photographed varying landscapes of contention spanning from Jericho to Nuremberg, to the house in Siauliai, Lithuania where my grandmother was born before the war. Photographing and working in archives, I collected imagery and ephemera whose incompleteness, irony and poetic sensibilities point to ruptures in history, and occupy a place where the lines between myth and fact become difficult to distinguish.
Framed by the relationship between my grandfather (a Jewish-Lithuanian survivor of Dachau), my dad (who briefly lived on an Israeli kibbutz in the 1970s) and me, A House Without a Roof wrestles with contradictory narratives and points of view. Histories and time fold into one another as the mythologies and memories of my family become entangled with the ongoing narratives of violence, trauma and mass displacement which continue to play out in present-day Israel and Palestine.
Multiple short stories appear dispersed throughout the book, reflecting events that either actually occurred or could have. They grapple with the anxieties of attempting to understand histories which have a myriad of truths and inhabit a dream-like space where my own memories and visions of the past, present and future blur together.