Zohar Elazar, born 1984
based in tel-aviv

Zohar Elazar completed her undergraduate studies in Photography at the Musrara Multidisciplinary School of Art and graduated with Honors from the MFA program of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. As a winner of the 'Artist in the Community Scholarship' by the Israeli Ministry of Culture she worked for two years with youth from the city of Rahat. She was awarded an Israeli Lottery Grant for the completion of a new video work.
She had solo exhibitions at the Art Cube Artists’ Studios in Jerusalem, Gallery Gross in Tel Aviv and Gallery Moryta, Fukuoka city, Japan. She has participated in group exhibitions at Inga Gallery, Indie Gallery, Haifa Museum, Ikona Gallery in Venice, Ana Ticho House, and Bank Art Studio NYK in Yokohama, Japan. Her video works have been screened at festivals in New York, Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Los Angeles and more.  

Zohar’s practice combines installation, performance, photography and video. Her creative process involves lingering in a particular place in an attempt to investigate the space’s relation to the body. Exposing the cultural, historical, and political narratives pertaining to a particular location allows her to raise questions relating to the body, the space and their relation: who leaves and who remains? Which traces are left behind and which are erased? How does time alter a place? In her works, Zohar operates on the fine line between biography and fabrication. She explores the tension between the hidden and the exposed; between inside and outside and how the two are reflected in one another.
For the past decade, Zohar has worked at the intersection of light and matter using the camera obscura — a constructed dark chamber that mimics the mechanisms of vision. She delimits a given space, seals it entirely and pierces just a small hole that allows rays of light to reach the inside of the space. Similarly to the physics of the eye, the external environment is reflected upside-down on the chamber’s inner walls.