Iris Hassid - Samar, Aya, Saja, and Manar, green car, Ramat Aviv

In her artistic practice, Iris Hassid examines questions of self-representation, identity, gender and transitional stages through an intimate, ongoing dialogue with her subjects – usually groups of girls and women. Since 2014, Hassid’s camera has been capturing moments from the daily lives of four students, Palestinian citizens of Israel, who study and live in Tel Aviv. The artist approached them in Ramat Aviv, where she lives, out of curiosity and keen interest in the highly visible presence of Arabic-speaking young women in the homogeneous Jewish neighborhood and on the Tel Aviv University campus nearby. Having experienced frequent relocations around the world as a child, she also felt a personal connection to the experiences of those young women, whom she approached gradually – experiences of foreignness, mobility and being away from home.

The first and significant acquaintance was with Samar, originally from Nazareth, who had just graduated from the School of Cinema and Television. Samar introduced Hassid to her cousin Saja, a psychology student, also from Nazareth; her friend Aya from Kafr Qara, who studied social work and gender studies; and Saja’s roommate Majdulin, an architecture student from Kafr Kanna. With time, hesitant encounters, some correspondence and spontaneous chats – at times casual, at times laden with emotion – deepened into a long-term relationship and an artistic project based on candid sharing and mutual trust.
Hassid photographed the four young women throughout and after their studies: in their rented apartments and workplaces, in their shopping sprees and hangouts in Tel Aviv, and during their family visits in the Galilee. The photographs are not meant to serve as a direct or “authentic” documentation of their world. Rather, they present portraits and snapshots shaped by consensual discussion – sometimes involving controversy and rejection – often staged but reliable representations of their preoccupations, dreams, aesthetic tastes and social relations, as well as of processes of maturation, searching and self-determination occurring within a complex set of identification and cultural contexts. The gaze in this work is not unidirectional: whereas Hassid gazes at her subjects, they return their gaze to the camera and to the artist, expressing reflections, doubts and criticism, aware of the constant tension between affinity and otherness.

Hassid decided that the first photo session take place at the Broshim Student City Dormitories near the university, built on the ruins of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis. The burden of historical memory and the reality of life in Israel are also present in the following frames, framing the entire ongoing projects in different formats, under the specter of the events of the recent years – the growing nationalism, inflammatory public discourse and vendettas, culminating in October 7, 2023, and the ensuing war on Gaza.

A Place of Our Own, originally published as a monograph and subsequently developed into an exhibition, offers a multilayered, multivocal portrait of a social group that often encounters exclusion, prejudice, and outright suspicion and hostility. It is an encounter with a new generation of women from Arab society in Israel – independent, career-oriented, feminist – who blaze an individual and collective trail within family, community and professional settings, and between the contradictory demands of a national majority and minority. In these spaces, questions of identity, visibility, belonging and shared living arise repeatedly against the background of a conflicted and radicalizing political reality, in the face of which, the creativity and the relationship formed between the women participating in that “place of our own” offer a source of strength and hope.

This exhibition has been organised in cooperation with the Jewish Museum of Amsterdam.
Curator of the original exhibition in Jewish Museum Amsterdam: Judith Hoekstra
The Amsterdam exhibition was realised in collaboration with Iris Hassid, at the initiative of Victor Levie.