ARTIST STATEMENT
The first rule of thumb I learned as a photographer is that the sun is at its highest at noon—a reference point for understanding and managing shadows. This principle has long governed photography, from exposure to printing. I see it as mirroring the way regimes manage their own shadows, defining norms to shape narratives in their favor. But rather than endlessly circling these structures, my work moves toward sloughing them off—shedding inherited ways of seeing to expose something unresolved beneath. For the past decade, I have photographed real and fictional moments in the landscape of Palestine, governed by the occupation of my home country. Through shifts in vantage point and time, I build a speculative space of coexistence, where what is and what could be remain in tension. Revisiting landscapes, I reposition my camera to create parallax shifts that disorient the familiar until it loses its bearings. The present in my images is never fixed; it is a past folded into the shadows of the future. The shutter acts not as a tool for capture but as a metronome, marking time as it hesitates, lingers, and waits. This way of working—taking in reality in small bites—became even more central when I relocated to the U.S. in 2021. Photography became a means of sloughing—a slow process of shedding, breaking down experience into fragments, and reshaping heaviness into something new. Not an escape, but a quiet refusal to remain bound.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Galit Aloni (b. 1983) uses photography and installation as performative tools to challenge perceptions of divided landscapes. Her work invites viewers to experience a parallax shift, questioning conventional ways of seeing. A recipient of the Tuttle Award and a teaching fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Galit’s practice critiques power structures while examining how vision is conditioned and manipulated by the socio-political dynamics of photography. Originally from Israel, her work exposes the colonialist legacies and documentary conventions historically upheld by the medium. Relocating to the Midwest in 2021 enabled a way to connect similar tensions that reflects from a future perspective on the ongoing oppression, driving her to explore the evolving relationship between observation and landscape. Through installations that embrace visual tension and blur the boundaries of familiarity, Galit crafts a form of resistance. Her art disrupts entrenched visual narratives, provoking transformative dialogues about authority, cultural shifts, and the intricate intersections of vision and power.
© Galit Aloni