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Indisclosure: Not remembering/ as not knowing/ forgetting/ forgetting the urge/ and its reason

(Roi Kuper, 1987)

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A big heavy ship, forged in the open sea. Not flowting, nor sailing, pulled by conflicting forces.

And the entire image, dots, spots, fragments; An image that crumbles from within itself. Another shows obscure figures, emerging and immersed, as though originating from a different world altogether, condensed and self-absorbed.

Vanishing Zones, a body of photographic works from 1990-1994 is a lyric body of works, introvert and distanced that does not easily lend itself to interpretation. The images included in this body of works evade definition or a fixation of a singular meaning. In all of them there is found outstanding paradoxical power of radical existence and inexistence. A force that stems from constant movement, smooth, flowing, between black and white, between contrast and haziness, between defining and identifying outlines and blurring, obscurity, and effacement.

Illusion, tension, ambiguity, intimacy, strangeness and alienation all trickle in the scenes, in a single composition of transparency and turbulence, creating a situation of a strange journey lacking tension between floatation and wallowing, between elevation and submersion.

The works could be said to be triggering a pattern of addiction. An addition to the never ending search for a coherent, cohesive, recognizable image, but at the same time also to the ongoing attempt to escape it, and the immediate meaning it embodies, to slip away to different worlds, undefined, nonverbal, that grasp one with their sensual powers. Grasping and not letting go.

The work began with photographs taken by Kuper at different locations in Israel, using a video cam or toy-cameras with a relatively small negative. The process included an initial printing of the images, separating the printing paper to its layers and saving only the emulsion, contact printing it to create a new negative, and reprinting it. And so, over and over again, so that each time details and parts of the original image are erased, until it eventually crumbles. In addition, after singling out the chosen print, a destruction of the other prints and usually also of the original negative.

Undoubtedly, Kuper’s works deal somehow, indirectly, with memory. With its obscuring, fragmentation, its addictive delusion. As though trying to cope with the essence of the word ‘memory’, not as an abstract term or concept, but as an existing, vivid, essence, though amorphous and elusive in its physical dimension, as the existential essence itself. Yet the conceptual move that Kuper initiates with the intricate series of action that was earlier described, forms a substantial shift in the focus of traditional photography, which grants utter importance to the indexical values, on the one hand, and to their possible reproduction, on the other. This conceptual move also involves a sensual-emotional reaction, for the impossibility of reproducing identical images, duplicates, intensifies the uniqueness of each image, and the feeling of its potential loss.

The sensuous material qualities that are the outcome of the processing of the images, charges many of the works with associations of unbound and undefined time, space and depth; Associations that are related to Kuper’s individual memories, memories of a child looking for his father by the sea, behind the house, maybe in the trees. In this sense it can be said that the works not only deal with memory, but also stem from it. But Kuper does not easily fall into such sentimental traps. He manages to preserve the tension between the fundamental lack of importance of the occurrences in the photographs, and the specific importance that could be given to them by a personal memory, thus enabling the fascinating reciprocal relations between the private and the universal, the experiential and the conceptual, while challenging the sweeping dichotomies between them.

Vanishing zones, zones where existence turns into inexistence, to emptiness. Zones where nothing is defined or certain, other than uncertainty itself.

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Hadas Maor, November 1998

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