Ohad Matalon

Ohad Matalon

Israeli Ohad Matalon, born in 1972, is a well-established photographer who teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. In his ongoing project The Zone, Matalon doggedly investigates Israel’s political and geopolitical issues by exploring the geographical and social fringes of Israel and their struggle to establish their own identity. In works such as Niad (2000), for instance, an Arab–Israeli is staged in a romantic Orientalist pose as an allegorical ‘guardian of the desert’. Hofman Family (2003) is a portrait that exemplifies the recent immigration of Russian Jews and points to problems in the multi-ethnic state of Israel that are the result of a clash in religious and political identities.
In recent works such as Tower-Egypt Border (2011/13), Matalon draws attention to Israel’s dramatic ongoing search for normality by depicting military towers that are both war relics and parts of a utopian landscape.