Jennifer Abessira is a photographer who works in between Tel Aviv and Paris, but the actual site of her art is her Instagram account. She posts her palpable images daily, creating an intimate journal that belongs to the public. Privacy, for her, is not opposed to being in the open. She does not need a “room of her own,” a studio in which the world’s imposing presence – its noise and flux of images -- could be bracketed [… ] In Abessira’s life, her images function as a coordinate-system for managing the formless and chaotic. She has always been attracted to archives and archival work and, in this sense, “Instagram comes in easy, with the simple platform it provides for organizing things.” In her Instagram journal, chaos and void do not disappear. They are fully present. But they appear through idiosyncratic modulations of order instantiated by a system of sardonic hashtags: #She Wanted to Die but She also Wanted to Live in Paris / #A Girl is a Gun Peow Peow / #TelAviv Forever / #The Triumph of Vegetation is Total / #Contribution to a Theory of Architecture, etc. Abessira carefully tags her images. Her hashtags are the verbal seams of a multi-levelled visual matrix. Encountering her work, we look at a new atlas of images that dreams of an infinite catalogue while speaking to us in an intensity that cannot be represented.” | Text by Prof. Hagi Kenaan 

 

Jennifer Abessira  holds an MFA from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. She graduated her MA studies in Interdisciplinary Arts and her BA in general history and French Literature, all from Tel Aviv University.