web: www.danaariel.com

Artist's statement

The works presented here are part of my research project Sites of Unlearning: Encountering Perforated Ground.
I use photography, printmaking, video, drawing, and text, to create works that attend to the political and ambiguous edges of words and images. My practice explores the photographic print as a site of unlearning. This developed from the fascination with the German verb verlernen that translates to unlearning, or forgetting in English. The detour through the German word adds a notion of loss to the understanding of the term as an ongoing action and a process, one that needs to be attended to repeatedly. Another reading of the word could suggest an active intention to forget through gestures of inversion, silent withdrawal, or violent rupture. Through the literal and poetic propositions offered by the word, I revisit sites in Israel, Palestine, Germany, and the UK, which bring into conflict notions of seeing and knowing.