Birds of Israel

photo series | 2016-2022

Israel is a geographic intersection of Eurasia and Africa. This condition makes it a host to around 500 million birds migrating between two continents every year. There are large flocking migrants such as storks, cranes and pelicans, small migrants travelling through parks and gardens, as well as wanderers such as vultures, whose migration behaviour is non-seasonal and unexplained. The sheer amount of the birds flying through the territory is also a danger to its military aircraft, sometimes causing a fatal collision between them. To prevent the accident, Israeli ornithologists have developed a system to forecast the complex migration patterns of the birds.

This series of works is composed with the photos of the birds, landscapes and museum collections in Israel. There appears the relationship between two kinds of spaces — the one defined by nature, and the other defined politically, culturally and technologically by humans — that exist independently but inevitably encounter with each other. These photos, capturing the efforts and desires of humans to understand the space ruled by nature, are turned into montages, collages and installations to yet again flip the viewer's sense of visual space.

(with kind permission of the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History / Tel Aviv University for the use of their bird specimens)