Ilit Azoulay, Queendom

Ilit Azoulay (born 1972 in Tel Aviv-Jaffa, lives and works in Berlin) is known for her photographic tableaux, which are collages of everyday objects, architectural fragments and artefacts. She continues her unique methodology of photographic fragmentation and composition of previously unnoticed objects and their stories in her current project. In 2022, she will contribute to the Israeli pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Using large-format panoramic photomontages, a collaborative sound installation and architectural interventions, Azoulay transforms the pavilion from Eurocentric modernism to the contemporaneity of the Middle East. Based on forgotten archive material on medieval inlaid vessels of Islamic art, the exhibition centres on the question of ownership of images and cultural appropriation. Queendom - a history of transformations - emerged from an all-encompassing systemic crash resulting from a malfunction of existing power structures, spilling over from digital space and flushing a new order of data into reality.

The artist picks up on this upheaval in the experimental 360° publication, which expands on the exhibition and has neither a specific beginning nor an end. Azoulay's photomontages form the fixed points of the book as cartographies of Queendom. The accumulative visual worlds and polyphonic text contributions by Naomi Alderman, Timo Feldhaus, Tehila Hakimi, Hanin Hannouch, Shelley Harten, Sheikha Hlewa, Adi Keissar, Lali Tsipi Michaeli, Vicki Shiran and Anat Zecharia reflect the Queendom's ability to be a networked space of knowledge production in which narratives and history merge.

Editor: Shelley Harten

Language: English/Hebrew/Arabic

Format: 23x29,7

240 pages, 103 colour and 31sw illustrations, softcover with spiral binding and flaps in slipcase

Year of publication: 2022

ISBN 978-3-95476-477-8