Ilit Azoulay was born in 1972 in Tel Aviv, Israel. She lives and works in Berlin. Her works (Photomontages) are presented at the Israel Pavilion of the Biennale at the Giardini.
To do her works, Ilit Azoulay reappropriated the research work of art historian David Storm Rice (1913-1962).
For the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem, Storm Rice had photographed thousands of pieces of inlaid and embossed metal tableware, objects made and sold in the Middle East, regardless of their ethnic or religious origins.
Most of these objects arrived in Europe via Venice and thus ended up in the collections of many Western museums where Storm Rice photographed them.
Ilit Azoulay studied the work of Storm Rice and became interested in the regional history of the objects he had photographed.
She first scanned the photographs, then enlarged, cut, superimposed and transformed them by photomontage, thereby creating new objects with different origins and thus creating new links between them.
The new life she gave to these objects and their metamorphosis gave birth to this exhibition “Queendom”, her feminine kingdom.
According to her, this digital female kingdom is a response to the poor functioning of the national and universal patriarchal power structures that preceded us.
Her work must be seen as a new order extracted from his digital realm, her “Queendom” ready to spread in our real world and transform it.
“I am habitually working research-based, and through the medium of photography de- and recomposing what we usually perceive as set. In the Biennale my project Queendom challenges the male-dominated and national sets of knowledge and information transfer. I show large panoramic photomontages that appear in the pavilion alongside a collaborative soundwork and architectural interventions” Ilit Azoulay
