Adi Nes

Question 1

Adi Nes: Early work aim

Answer 1

Early work focused almost exclusively on depictions of masculinity in contemporary Israel.

Question 2

Adi Nes: Intentions of the biblical stories series and exploration of his use of Tableau Vivant in this series


Answer 2

1. Appropriates biblical stories and heroes to create a new idea, while still drawing on the original biblical stories and heroes.
2. Seeks to make biblical legend relevant for a contemporary audience.
3. He aims to represent biblical heroes as dispossessed and homeless, focusing on their human qualities, their sufferings and hardships.

Question 3

Adi Nes: The Biblical Stories series (2006)

Answer 3

1. Appropriates the Jewish themes of Exile and exodus and reads them against the intense poverty and homelessness he had come to experience in Tel Aviv.
2. The background for the Biblical Stories series is the social and political reality of contemporary Israel, as it moves further and further away from the socialist ideology of its founders.
3. Nes has displaced biblical heroes with contemporary immigrants- the poor, the homeless, and those on the margins of society.

Question 4

Adi Nes: The Biblical Stories Series (Political commentary)

Answer 4

1. Looks at the promise that Israel has held for immigrants, interrogating the notion of the promised land by questioning “the dream and what happened to it.”
2. Biblical narratives have been utilised to construct Israeli National identity - Nes uses narratives to comment on socio-political milieu.
3. Nes deconstructs the myths of national identity.

Question 5

Adi Nes: The Biblical Stories Series (Palestine photographic views)

Answer 5

1. Pictured contemporary inhabitants as if they’d just emerged from the bible.
2. Actual lives of people at the time were obscured by colonizing interests.
3. Figures were absent from the land entirely in early survey photographs.
4. Photographs which did include inhabitants imagined them in a timeless way.
5. Land imagined as a symbol of faith framed by Christian theology.

Question 6

Adi Nes: The Biblical Stories Series (Zionist photographic views)

Answer 6

1. Also framed through a biblical lens but envisioned this in continuity with the Jewish past of Eretz Israel( The Holy Land)
2. Photography played a role in grafting a new culture into an old one. 3. Photography affirmed the aims of national Zionism.

Question 7

Adi Nes: Background

Answer 7

1. Born in Kiryat Gat, Israel, 1966.
2. Graduated Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, 1992
3. Works in Tel-Aviv.
4. A Gay man who is the son of Iranian and Kurdish immigrants, who immigrated to Israel.