We ceaselessly try to rewrite history, but the past always finds ways of clinging on for dear life. In school, it's the dusty old chalkboard in eighth grade homeroom that has never been properly scrubbed. Faint powdered outlines of penises and penmanship mark the crime scene, alibis buried beneath algebra equations.
In the bedroom, it's the perfectly made bed. The scent of fabric softener lingers atop layers of crisp white sheets, an illusion of purity offset by dark stains: Merlot? Tomato sauce? Worse? Remnants of past lovers toss and turn between the sheets.
© Micha Bar-Am
For Israeli photographer Micha Bar-Am, it is these beds, and more importantly, hotel beds, that caught the attention of his camera lens. In his "Bedscapes," which is the first of his photographic Palimpsest series curated by Dr. Guy Morag Tzepelewitz and on display at the Almacen Gallery this month, Bar-Am has strung together a travel narrative through the beds and hotel rooms he slept in over the years to create a "dramatization formed unintentionally...the folds and wrinkles seem to be marks of life, dream drawings erased daily by the hotel workers as they prepared the room for the next temporary tenant."
© Micha Bar-Am
His second series delves into the political discourse he is better known for. Bar-Am zooms in on graphic anti-occupation graffiti from 1987-1992 sprayed on the West Bank walls before being covered over by the IDF. Again, he captures years of poignant history that cannot simply be erased by a few coats of paint.
© Micha Bar-Am
Join Bar-Am on this abstract, visual journey of erasure and change as he addresses the "obliteration of identity, the presence of meaning, and its replacement with a different one."
Palimpsest opens on March 1 and lasts until April 10 at the Almacen Gallery in Jaffa.