“LOCUST #10”: This work by Dor Guez, part of a series made in response to photographs of the 1915 locust plague, is featured in “Colony / Dor Guez,” on view through February 12 at the Princeton University Art Museum’s galleries at Art@Bainbridge on Nassau Street.

Jaffa-based artist Dor Guez’s penetrating transformations of early 20th-century photographs of Jerusalem are the subject of a thought-provoking exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum’s galleries at Art@Bainbridge. The exhibition, titled “Colony / Dor Guez,” will be on view through February 12.

“Colony / Dor Guez” brings together photography, film, and installation works the artist created from five years of research in the archives of the American Colony, a charitable Christian community of Americans, and later Swedes, established in Jerusalem in 1881. In the first decades of the 20th century, the artists of the American Colony created hundreds of photographic views of Jerusalem and its surroundings that they disseminated to an international audience eager to see the sites that, described in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim texts, came to be known as the Holy Land. Guez transforms these historical photographs, exploring the ways that photography was employed to construct an image of the region.

“The powerful work by Dor Guez is a potent and visually arresting rejoinder to the idea that histories are ever settled,” said James Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum.

In the titular work of this exhibition — Colony, a three-channel video and sound installation — a narrator recounts a tale of feast and famine, interweaving details of a plague of locusts that descended on Egypt, Syria, and Palestine from March to October of 1915 with stories from the Bible. Guez, working from pictures created by the American Colony to document the 1915 locust plague for Ottoman and British imperial authorities, has cropped, sequenced, and choreographed images across a triptych of screens to create a parable that, in spanning modern and ancient times, suggests that these stories of the past might also provide an allegory for the present.

In another series made in response to photographs of the locust plague, Guez focuses on the doubled pictures of stereo photographs. Stereo views place two identical images flush with one another such that, when viewed through a set of lenses, they create an illusion of deep space. Guez became interested in the symbolic resonances of a set of glass-plate negatives documenting the locust plague that had been damaged in a flood in the 1970s. Underscoring how the latter natural disaster occludes images of the first, Guez replicates pictures taken to document the plague then mirrors the picture along the edge where the image was lost due to the effects of the flood, creating compositions with the form of a Rorschach test. This effect lends a psychological or conceptual symbolism to the photographs, merging the documents of the two natural disasters and underscoring the subjectivity of both photography and archives in representing historical events. 

Guez was born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian family from Lydda on his mother’s side and Jewish immigrants from North Africa on his father’s. His work — often exploring relationships among art, narrative, memory, and displacement — has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions and is included in several international public collections, including the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Jewish Museum, New York; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; and the Museum of Modern Art, Bogota.

Art@Bainbridge is a gallery project of the Princeton University Art Museum. It is housed in the restored colonial-era Bainbridge House at 158 Nassau Street. Admission is free. For more information, visit artmuseum.princeton.edu.