Miki Kratsman: People I Met

August 20 – December 8, 2018
USF Contemporary Art Museum

For three decades, Miki Kratsman has been one of the leading chroniclers of life in the Israeli-occupied territories. His photographs—many of them documentary images taken during a previous life as a press photographer for the Israeli newspapers Hadashot and Haaretz—uncover personal stories while revealing the violent, often detached nature of Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

While trying to answer the question “What happened to the people in the photographs?,” Kratsman amassed a vast archive of more than 9,000 portraits of anonymous Palestinians, which he first uploaded onto a dedicated Facebook page in 2011. The USFCAM installation materializes the artist’s growing portrait archive together with identifying commentary that, in some cases, serves as a literal proof of life—or death. People I Met raises questions about the culture of representation and continues the museum’s tradition of presenting challenging artwork with social content.

The exhibition also includes works from several other contemporaneous projects. These include photographic selections from Kratsman’s Bedouin Archive and his Displaced series, and table-top “panoramas” of “unrecognized” Arab villages the Israeli government has slated for demolition. The 2017 video titled 70 Meters... White T-shirt condenses a year of shooting in the Palestinian village of Nabi Salih.

Curated by USF Contemporary Art Museum curator-at-large Christian Viveros-Fauné; organized by USFCAM. Exhibition made possible by USF World and The Artis Grant Program.

<Exhibition Brochure PDF>

<Press Release PDF>

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