ARTIST STATEMENT

The camera eye that began, just a few generations ago, to affirm the visible world around us is now in the process of displacing that world with its own more available, coherent image. When we think of the "world", do we not think of a photograph?                                      - Wright Morris, Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing and Memory

Throughout history, photography has been used for the empirical gathering of knowledge about worlds known and unknown. I am interested in institutions and practices which – like photography itself – produce, organize, and structure knowledge; I am fascinated with museums, where carefully selected objects are categorized and put on display so that they can be known through observation. Deeply rooted in modern ways of thinking which revolved around the idea of empirical understanding of the world, museums help shape the ways in which we understand nature, history, science, geography, and cultural difference; they are instruments for building collective identity and memory; they allow us to preserve the past. Museums provide the most powerful type of representation – a visual one – often allowing us to see things that we wouldn't otherwise be able to see. Based on the notion that "seeing is believing", these visual representations are often read as factual and true.

In my most recent body of work, Fool's Gold, I use a medium whose main function is to provide a visual representation of the world – photography, to examine another medium with the same function – the museum. This series consists of photographic images taken in museums that are dedicated to history, historic art, history of nature and sciences, as well as in my studio. I use photographic and digital manipulations to disrupt objects, exhibits, and spaces, creating fictive and enigmatic images, through which I raise questions about our ability to represent the world and understand it. The act of deception lies in plain sight, challenging the ability of an image to depict truth or deliver knowledge, and questioning our ability to gain visual access to, and virtual ownership of, the world. 

BIOGRAPHY

Tal Barel (b. 1985) is a New York based artist working primarily in photography. Originally from Tel Aviv, Israel, she received her BFA in photography from the Bezalel Academy for Art and Design in Jerusalem in 2012 and is her MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, in 2015. Her work examines the idea of representation, historical narratives and western aesthetics.