HADAR SAIFAN 

Text By Kobi Ben-Meir

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During the war, Saifan returned from patrols along the northern border to her studio. In the studio, she repeated the movement of encircling the settlements: she perforated the outlines of the perimeter roads with black paper, backlit the paper, and then walked her camera around the paper-marked communities, moving them slowly and with long exposures along the perimeter, as if she were stretching a hermetic fence around the settlement in defense. In the resulting image—perhaps a sparkling jewel, perhaps a suffocating fence—there is no trace of the life that was supposed to fill the settlements; in their place remains a black, absent void.