Curator: Tal Yahas
Ronit Porat operates as an investigator in a crime scene, searching for clues to map the ways in which
the past enters the present, exploring history’s traces in order to collect visual signs that enable her to
decipher the emotional space in which she acts and is being activated. She works with archival material
in a motion that shifts between the personal to the collective and back to the autobiographical, thus
examining the power of images to echo in memory, to generate identification and stimulate anew pains
subdued.
In recent years Porat’s practice is based on a historical research and focuses on the collection,
processing and juxtaposition of images from various sources - documents, postcards, magazines, maps,
slides etc. that she finds in various archives or online – through which she distills and recreates possible
narratives interlinked loosely to her autobiography. Reflecting on the legacy of the photographs she
uses, Porat questions the photographic medium and the various ways in which one can create in it and
with it in current times.
In Rudolph von Laban’s Movement Analysis, the term “Kinesphere” describes the personal space that
surrounds the body (defined by the extreme points of the extended limbs) and the ways in which one
moves in it. This space has emotional implications on the way one grasps and navigates herself and her
relation to the world. Porat borrows the term and in her photographic installation Kinesphere, which is
constructed from dozens of photographic collages, she extends and connects between the territories of
the body and of the mind. Through interweaving collective databases mainly from Germany between
the two world wars, and various Kibbutz and private albums she unravels narratives tracing central
figures in the arts scene during the Weimar Republic (especially from the field of dance) and creates
through them axes of appropriation and identification that entangle with memories from her childhood
through her adult being.
Her collages span between minor interventions to distinct cut and paste methods, which are reinforced
through a non-linear installation and her handwritten textual adjuncts implanted in the display. While
referring to Dadaist collage traditions developed in central Europe in the era she is looking at, Porat
extends the direct dialectics through the submerging of sources and contexts and the texts in first
person that she leaves open to interpretation. By this she uncovers the role photography plays in the
construction of personal and collective memory and knowledge and how they turn into fragmentary
parameters which constantly develop and change influencing the perception of the self, leaving traces
on the body and on its potential movement and presence in space.