In the late 1960s, when I was 17, I immigrated from Poland to Israel. All my life I have asked myself whether Israel was the right place for me. My friends chose Scandinavia, my parents wanted to go to America, and I dreamt of Zion.

Relocation raises questions about displacement, belonging, and immigration. The body of work comprises several sections, the central of which features a set of staged or doctored images. Some show myself, photographed holding a suitcase against a backdrop of foreign landscapes, ready to migrate to another place, far from here. In another image I am lying down, perhaps sleeping, perhaps dead, over roadmaps on which I tried to locate my proper location. The maps and the suitcase are also present in other images, ones in which I am not seen, symbolizing the experience of immigration.

Also featured is the video Dictionary. This work shows index photographs of figures, objects and conditions present throughout my life, one after the other. Between images I read aloud the name of the object appearing on screen in the languages I live in—Polish and Hebrew.

Another focal point is the Immigrant Nest installation—a sculpture in the shape of a bird’s nest made of non-native, “immigrant,” plants. Like human immigrants, some plants fail to transplant and consequently disappear. Some persist, but do not intermingle with the native population. Some are successfully transplanted, integrating and enriching the local flora without causing any harm, and some take over large areas of the land at the expense of the indigenous population.

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