“Esther Naor: The Object is Present,” curated by Shlomit Dror

In this new body of work, Esther Naor’s investigation takes place inside her mother’s home. A daughter of Iraqi-Jewish immigrants, who migrated to Israel in 1950, Naor examines and photographs her mother’s miniature object collection she ceremoniously amassed over the years. Returning to her childhood home, Naor’s attention is drawn to these souvenirs and trinkets that occupy visible spaces in this domestic environment, raising questions about interior aesthetics and identity, and mother-daughter relationship. In her photographs, Naor captures each miniature individually, o ering an objective, quasi-clinical representation. She decontextualizes these home ornaments from their original display by placing them against colorful backgrounds, and using bright lighting and minimal shadow, conjuring a flat appearance. The previous arrangement of these artifacts and their placement inside the house remain unknown to the viewer. Yet, through this meticulous documentation of personal objects, Naor attempts to trace the collector’s identity and background.

The collection consists of souvenirs from tourists’ sites, replicas of canonical figures, dolls, and a sundry of porcelain and other miniatures–all manufactured by machines or anonymous artisans. Portraying her mother through this collection, Naor’s photographs reveal that many cultures from around the world are present, except for her mother’s. Through this process, Naor realizes that the lack of material culture associated with the Iraqi-Jewish community is directly linked to her mother’s displacement and migration story: similar to many Jewish families who fled Iraq right a er the establishment of the state of Israel, she was prohibited from taking any personal belongings, leaving all of her and her family’s household possessions behind. Establishing a new home in Israel, her mother recreated and adopted a new identity that reconciled between these exterior and interior spaces.