Sharon Ya'ari / Humanities and Friends
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Sommer Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Sharon Ya’ari – Humanities and Friends, at Sommer Salon Zurich, as part of Zurich Art Weekend. The opening reception will take place on Friday, September 17, between 11:00-21:00 at the rooftop apartment at Theaterstrasse 18, 8001 Zurich.

For this exhibition Sharon Ya’ari presents a photographic installation that consists of two types of images:
prints of 35mm slides which were utilized for teaching the Renaissance Art era (Michelangelo sculptures) and
prints of slides of landscape images that served educational purposes in Israel before the digital turn and
were used to teach about the country, the love of the land, its beauty, nature, history etc. The act of salvaging
the images and reusing them by digitally scanning the old slides freezes in time their constant flux and act of
decomposing, blurring, fading and loss of information. This process enables Yaari to suspend these analogical
changes and to question the documentary quality attributed to photography. In his Slides series, Yaari
approaches photography as a medium that intermediates between inaccessible bodies of knowledge and
faraway places, while focusing on the physical peripheral consciousness.

The slides of art history were photographed from European books by lecturers and were passed over to
generations of art history teachers. Each image contains the information of those who have been using it
before and the influence of time passing, thus resulting in damaged slides that have been scratched. Most of
the slides lost their colors, turned red and continuously keep changing and disappearing. Yaari’s exhibition
reflects upon the inaccuracy and inefficiency that the photographic image produces, albeit its role as a visual
testimony or record, such as the disruptions and variations in the hues of the images derived from art history
and of historical sites. At the center of the slides works lies the fictitious contradiction, the inability to separate
between art, time passing, leisure, escapism, political realism and history.

Sharon Yaari’s photography differs from the visual-culture material from which sociological, anthropological
and political insights can be extracted. Its ambition is to exhaust photography’s technical-material capacities
as the climax of a process of observation that is descriptive of a world; to recognize the responsibility for and
the necessity of the act of observation on the one hand, while casting doubt on photography’s validity and
capacity of producing meaning on the other.

Opening hours during Zurich Art Weekend:
Friday, Sept 17, 11:00- 21:00
Saturday, Sept 18, 11:00-20:00
Sunday, Sept 19, 11:00-19:00

Exhibition Dates:
Thursday-Friday, 11:00-17:00 and by appointment.
The exhibition will run through October 31, 2021