as born in 1966 and raised in Kiryat Gat, Israel, to Sephardic Jewish parents of Kurdish and Iranian descent. Despite his poor upbringing, his parents nurtured his creative side and he studied photography at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. Now based in Tel Aviv, he has participated in numerous group and one-person exhibitions since 1993. His work is in the collections of the Israel Museum, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum (New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Today he is one of Israel’s most widely recognized artists, known for his provocative staged portraits and tableaux (his provocative 1999 work Untitled -The Last Supper, a staged image of Israeli soldiers positioned to evoke Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the same event, has been sold in 2007 at Sotheby’s annual auction of Israel and Jewish art for $264,000); his works are a series of staged and digitally manipulated conceptual images that explore issues of gender, personal and national identity.
While Nes’s photographs are staged, they aim to illuminate the space between Israel’s social realities and its ideals. He creates his images from the point of view of the expectant construction only to reveal that it is a complex series of negotiations and re-negotiations of cultural, nationalist, historical, and personal dynamics. Nes proposes that it is this complex notion of identity that establishes the set the conditions of how we enact, resist, and interpret the world. In “Soldiers” series (1994-2000), Nes focuses on the depiction of Israeli soldiers and questions the very context of the macho role often equated with the figure. In his work the image of the soldier, traditionally operating as a fetishized nationalist symbol, becomes human through his re-interpretation. Nes hired models, make-up and a teams of assistants to create large-scale staged photographs depicting Israeli soldiers at work, in combat, at play, and at rest. Placed within the context of the Israeli military, Nes subverts the image of the rugged legendary Israeli soldier of the l967 legend into a series of pretty boys posing and letting off steam.
In Nes’s photographs, the image of the Israeli soldier is transformed from the fit-and-friendly youth of fifty years ago to a figure far more edgy, incongruous, overbuilt, narcissistic, masculine, homoerotic, and orthodox, but still powerful. Nes has said, “This was my way of criticizing the bad mix that is Power and Judaism”. By making direct reference to the Israeli military, Nes intends for the viewer to question the nature of identity: real, assumed, invented, cultural, national, and specific. In Nes’s work the Israeli soldier becomes a symbol for the nation as a whole. He has defined the series as exploring themes of masculinity, fraternity, and of national and cultural identity. Although initially seeming to be confident images, they gradually reveal themselves to be filled with inner turmoil. A highly circulated photograph by Nes involves a muscular youth in army pants and a knit yarmulke. Half naked, he stands in the sand outside his pitched tent flexing his biceps in a bodybuilding pose and wearing military boots on his feet.
The image combines the religious and militaristic identities of Israel in a single figure and the strangeness of the image brings into question the continued coexistence of these divergent aspects of the definition of the country. Nes’s images are not meant to be sentimental; they are a decisive statement of gender and sexuality filled with intellectual insight, which relates to the turbulent undercurrent in the dreams, politics, personal issues, and social realities of the Middle East.
“Boys” series (2000) focuses on Mizrahims, Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caucasus who occupy a marginal status in contemporary Israeli society. About this work, whose iconography is taken from the pantheon of Greek and Roman myths, Nes has said that the inspiration is partially autobiographical: “My staged photographs are oversized and often recall well-known scenes from Art History and Western Civilization combined with personal experiences based on my life as a gay youth growing up in a small town on the periphery of Israeli society”. “I think the main purpose of my exhibition — of my work at all — is issues of identity,” says Nes.
“As a gay man in Israel, the issues of identity are the male identity and the Israel identity. That’s why I chose to first work with soldiers and then work with teenagers, because both soldiers and teenagers are at the age where their identity is being questioned.” Where Nes grew up, he explained, people of European descent were revered, while those of Iranian, Iraqi, Middle Eastern or Spanish descent were considered minorities. For this reason, he chose mostly dark-skinned boys as the subjects of his latest work. “I looked for … dark skinned boys because when you’re a minority, you question your identity again,” Nes explains. “It’s like to be gay, it’s like to be Jewish, it’s like to be dark skinned.”
The third series is “Prisoners” (2003): Nes was asked by Vogue Hommes International to participate in a large fashion project dedicated to the Middle East, to be published in the magazine’s 2003-4 winter edition. Besides Nes, editor Richard Buckley invited photographers from Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Ramallah and Kuwait City to submit photographs that represented their view of the Middle East. As an illustration of his belief that fashion is a part of real life, Nes chose ordinary people rather than professional models to pose in the expensive designer clothes provided for the shoot.
Vogue supplied the clothes; partly because he used ordinary people instead of real models, and of course partly because of the composition, the expensive designer clothes look very ordinary. The editor of Vogue Hommes had specified that he did not want the photographs for the Middle East project to be political, yet it was undeniable that Nes’s photographs are full of political statements – be they ever so subtle. In order to avoid controversy, Buckley insisted on noting in the article’s opening captions that the photographs were staged, and not of real prisons or prisoners.
In “Biblical Stories” series (2003–06), Nes transports figures from the Old Testament to scenes depicting contemporary homelessness. He chooses moments from the original stories when the characters found themselves dispossessed or exiled and draws on recognizable visual sources as wide-ranging as Caravaggio’s paintings and Dorothea Lange’s photographs. Casting ordinary people as the biblical figures, Nes imagines the characters of tribal myth as denizens of Israel’s new urban underclass, “homeless” in the heart of the Jewish homeland. He inscribes these foundational figures of Jewish history in a global conversation that touches not simply on Israel but on the universal right for a person to have a home.
He decided to use Jewish biblical figures as his inspiration because their stories were recognized, dramatic, and good metaphors. He thought about these characters during the lowest points of their stories and decided he wanted to cast them as lower-class homeless people who had lost their identity.
His photo of Abraham and Isaac, perhaps the most publicized photo from this series, shows Abraham as a scruffy and penniless homeless man pushing a supermarket trolley full of bags of recycled bottles where Isaac lays peacefully on top ready to accept his fate. “I used recycled bottles because I was thinking about the idea of the recycled myth of this land. Many fathers sacrifice their sons for the army – this process is recycled over and over again for the ideals of this country.”
www.dylanricci.com
