The show tells the story of Angelika's nuclear family, which has immigrated to Israel from Vilna several years ago.

Sher's photographs display a strong inclination to preserve the culture from which they have been uprooted – culture in the widest sense of language, education, food, customs, and dress.

In her photography, Angelika Sher tries to track the construction of the intergenerational  connection and preserve it. We all share the experience of leafing through old photo albums and being intrigued by the yellowing pictures, trying to decipher the images of our relatives. We find ourselves looking for objects which might tell us the stories of our ancestors. “We close our eyes for a second and hope that touching these objects would take us back to the days when they used to be  our share of this wide world, and that they might tell us the whole story...”

Family Album

Haaretz 15.4.2008

Angelika Sher's small show, “Mother's Fur Coat,” is part of “First Friday,” a series exhibiting works of young artists, curated by Yehudit Metzkel. The series joins several others dedicated to debut solo shows, the oldest of which is Jerusalem's Stages (another was recently curated by Metzkel at the Haifa Museum).

The nature of Sher's show, being a debut of a young artist, determines its modest size and affords a certain latitude, though it is not really called for here. Her work stands out as excellent,, immediately memorable photography. She successfully juxtaposes the banal and the solemn, the strange and the threatening, the hidden and the suppressed. Her subject, which is her own family, is one of the fundamental subjects of photography and of art in general. The need to commemorate, question, and study the family is a basic human one, recurring throughout all times and in all media.

Sher was born in Lithuania in 1969, and came to Israel with her family at the age of 21. The photographs display a preoccupation with her culture and the issue of foreignness. In an excellent photograph she placed her family around a dining table. They are holding empty glasses, their faces and eyes hidden by masks, and the dim light creates a moment of sinister gaiety.


The Israeli Design Center, Mediatech Holon (2007)

The photographer Angelika Sher's first museum show, “Mother's Fur Coat,” will open on 2.2.07 as part of the Ramat Gan Museum “First Friday” series, in which artists are first introduced. The show tells the story of Angelika's nuclear family, which has immigrated to Israel from Vilna several years ago. Sher's photographs display a strong inclination to preserve the culture from which they have been uprooted – culture in the widest sense of language, education, food, customs, and dress.

In her photography, Angelika Sher tries to track the construction of the intergenerational  connection and preserve it. We all share the experience of leafing through old photo albums and being intrigued by the yellowing pictures, trying to decipher the images of our relatives. We find ourselves looking for objects which might tell us the stories of our ancestors. “We close our eyes for a second and hope that touching these objects would take us back to the days when they used to be  our share of this wide world, and that they might tell us the whole story...”

"The whole story is long and entangled in Jewish history,” says the artist. “You look two or three generations back and cannot believe that in such a short period your various ancestors managed to settle in the Ukraine, defend the synagogue in Vilna against repeated pogroms, be killed near Berlin in the Second World War, emigrate to America, build Communism, destroy it, and finally end up in Israel as “Russians.”