Acclaimed Israeli photographer Adi Nes will visit Bowdoin on Tuesday to deliver the Harry Spindel Memorial Lecture. His large-format photographs tackle issues of Jewish identity and masculinity, and will be a part of the exhibition “Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today” at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.
Nes was invited to be the lecturer after Harrison King McCann Professor of English Marilyn Reizbaum sent the Museum a proposal for his photographs to be displayed. She is exploring his work in her upcoming book “Unfit: The Jewish Science of Modernism.”
In his lecture, titled “Issues of Identity,” Nes will speak about his artistic style, his use of staged photography and the ways in which his photographs reflect the various facets of Israeli identity.
The exhibit will feature Nes’ photographs, which are large-format staged images that tell fictional stories about Israeli society. According to Reizbaum, the size of the photographs is important as it contributes to the dramatic nature of the images.
She added that by working on the same scale as old master artists, such as French Romantic artist Delacroix, Nes is able to speak to current moments and the ways in which they answer questions of Jewishness.
Ellen Tani, Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral curatorial fellow at the Museum, explained that the images are “references to an ideal utopia and on-the-ground grit of daily life.”
“He works in series and most of the works are untitled, and that’s purposeful because it lets the viewer come cleanly to the work without their own expectation of what it’s about without looking at it,” Tani said.
The larger exhibit, “Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today,” focuses on how artists use their practice to reckon with various challenges of our time.
“When I was putting it together, I was thinking about, in a global sense, what are artists confronting in their world in the last 100 years?” said Tani.
Tani felt as though Nes’ work fit well with the exhibition as it added a new dimension to the conversation about 20th and 21st century artwork.
“The drive of his photographic practice aligns really nicely with that theme and provides a really fascinating angle to which other works in our collection can’t necessarily speak, namely issues of ethnic difference in Israel, within Jewish culture and around issues relating to masculinity in Israeli culture,” Tani said.
Reizbaum, who has been in contact extensively with Nes for her book, expects that students will enjoy hearing Nes speak. According to Tani, the Museum hopes that the lecture and exhibit will allow students to gain new global perspectives on the concepts of difference and conflict, specifically in relation to race.
“So many of our conversations are preoccupied with racial frictions we are familiar with in the U.S.,” Tani said. “I hope that this stretches people’s notions of how this isn’t something that is unique to our culture. The fact that this is a human difference, is something that is experienced worldwide and that has great impact on lives that we don’t necessarily understand.”
“Art and Resolution: 1900 to Today” will be on display at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art fromNovember 15 through April 16, 2017.