The photographs of Rinat Shaina Davidovich have been made in a process of partial exposure with the emphasis on the missing. The artist initially photographed objects resembling fossils she made out of castings of concrete, sand, stone and other building materials. She then photographed images of seemingly human fossils using masks she herself made by casting concrete and other materials in molds of heads.
The artist works in the field of art that lies in the intermediate domain between architecture and the plastic arts. Coming from the field of architecture, she engages creatively in the relationships between work processes by manipulating media and diverse variegated materials. The figurative dimension is present in the majority of the artist’s fields of creativity. Images of faces and body parts are formed by hybridization and trials with materials.
The photographed material represents the sensitive or spiritual metaphysical whereas the mold and the frame represent the fixed restricted physical. The artist views the works as a hybrid that prevents taking these foundations apart.
Rinat Shaina Davidovich describes herself as an ambivalent person leading a twosome life in a double inward outward world. For her art serves as a means of expressing her unique internal world. Her entire work stretches across the gap between the material and the non-material. The exhibition Enigma deals with material frozen in time, raising issues of border, transience and biodegradation.
Daniella Talmor [independant curator, former curator in chief at Haifa museum of Art]
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The different languages employed by Rinat Shaina Davidovich, as much in the process as in the result, try to materialize universal mysteries and question our perception of presence and absence, of what exists and what has disappeared, of reality and memory.
The materiality, the tangible, the visible is evoked in her work through the human body, objects, and materials, while the immateriality convenes all non-physical elements that make up our identity, as the feelings, memories, innate perception of the world of others and of oneself.
In her series of masks, faces emerge from an undefined and vague space. Damaged, fragmented, or facing each other, the eyes are usually closed.
The masks are used in some cultures as a bridge between the visible and the invisible, between the spirit world and that of humans. The artist uses the mask as a gateway to the inner world, to memory. Like her masks, these memories can be very specific, fragmented, or disappearing.
Rinat Shaina Davidovich offers these portraits as a mirror, as a bridge between her memory-process and ours.
Her work on fossils attempts to describe the paradox surrounding disappearance: When things, people, events, or places disappear, they are not supposed to exist anymore. However, the memory process keeps them present and alive nonetheless.
These things, these beings, these events, these places ... eventually become fossils that inhabit the memory. The point of convergence between these two dimensions, material and immaterial, evokes the extraordinary feeling which arises upon realizing that something can remain present and alive when it is no longer before our eyes. It is present by the trace that it leaves, both physically (fossils) and in memories. Thus, the intangible becomes tangible, real in our memory.
Through the photographic process, memories and experiences are embodied in tangible images. Photography, like the fossil, leaves a trace of what has disappeared.
Rinat Shaina Davidovich lives and works in Tel Aviv – Israel.
Margalit Berriet/ Marie – Cécile Berdaguer [Mémoire de l’Avenir]