Lisa Oppenheim

The exhibition Sensing Nature shows two photographic works from the series Wild Flowers of Palestine by the New York multimedia artist Lisa Oppenheim. The two motifs come from the image archive of the American Colony, a Christian utopian religious community founded in 1881 by American emigrants in Ottoman Palestine. In addition to performing philanthropic tasks, they founded the legendary hotel of the same name in East Jerusalem, which still exists today. Over 20,000 surviving photographs document the community‘s activities, daily life, historical sites, and landscapes in the Holy Land. Today, the photo collection is part of the United States Library of Congress in Washington. The selected photographs are stereoscopic, created by a technique popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that makes a kind of pseudo-3D effect. In this process, a motif is photographed from two minimally different angles and juxtaposed—Lisa Oppenheim experiments with this historical photographic technique. Using analog development techniques, she pushes the two halves of the stereoscopic negative together in the lab to create a new double image. In doing so, she deliberately uses the inherent defects and exposure errors in the negatives to create new image compositions. The two motifs were taken between 1900 and 1920 and show two wildflowers typical of the Mediterranean region; the Anemone coronaria L., whose red blossoms light up the olive groves in spring, and the Althaea rosea Cav known as the hollyhock. The depiction of wildflowers isolated from their natural context gives them something iconic and unique. Lisa Oppenheim reinforces this phenomenon by greatly enlarging the original motif and presenting it in a way that fills the picture. The doubling of the blossoms and the visible traces of the development process gives them a temporal dimension. In this way, the long-forgotten historical motifs develop an entirely new presence of their own in space. Oppenheim succeeds in condensing the simplicity of the flowers into timeless images whose beauty at the same time reveals their vulnerability and danger.