TEL AVIV.- Vera Vladimirsky's (b. 1984, Ukraine) exhibition brings four photographic series together. In these works, Vladimirsky, who immigrated to Israel at the age of 7, engages with the experience of immigration and the encounter with the new country. In her photographs, she combines personal biography and documentation, fusing memory and longing with fiction to create a new narrative inspired by her childhood and by traditional Ukrainian crafts and ornaments. Vladimirsky's work process is stratified, involving different photographic practices. Her aesthetic choices and techniques refer to early 20th century avant-garde photography and modernist architecture, utilizing photographic collage and the encounter with natural Israeli light. She photographs architectural spaces, prints the photographs, installs them in other spaces, and photographs anew, thus spawning a deceptive space which subverts the architectural perspective, eliciting disorientation. In the series The Last Apartment, for example, Vladimirsky photographed over 25 apartments, where she lived over the years, rephotographing them in her current apartment. In the series So Long, she explored the Zionist project—its aura as well as its failures—by photographing a socialist public housing project marked for conservation. In the series Paper Walls, using digital means, she created wallpaper with repeated patterns of dense, colorful local flora, reminiscent of the domestic environment, familiar to her from her childhood in Ukraine. The series Surface and the Deepest Depths features, for the first time, images from her grandmother's home in Ukraine, spanning manipulated alongside direct photographs. Touching on domestic aesthetics, local architecture, and indigenous flowers, the exhibition offers a poignant viewing experience in which the private dissolves into the public and the individual reflects on the collective.

Curator: Raz Samira. Assistant Curator: Ilana Ellada Matatov

Vera Vladimirsky (b.1984 Ukraine, FSS, immigrated to Israel in 1991, lives and works in Tel Aviv) is a graduate of the Department of Photography, Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Jerusalem, and holds an M.F.A. from the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design, Tel Aviv. She has exhibited alone and in group exhibitions in Israel and abroad, and was awarded the Young Artist’s Prize, Israel's Ministry of Culture (2016) and the Yuri Stern Prize, Israel's Ministry of Aliyah and Integration (2018).

This is the seventh time the annual Presser Photography Award for a Young Israeli Artist has been awarded; previous winners are Rami Maymon (2015), Mark Yashaev (2016), Ronit Porat (2017), Daniel Tsal (2018), Eli Singalovski (2019) and Efrat Hakimi (2020). The prize carries a $5,000 grant and a solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.