(2013-2014)

A model of a Moscow icon, a colorful basilica, has emigrated from the Red Square in order to float above a dusty, sandy carpet. Six elegant men's hats – associated with an orthodox Jew, a gentleman, a cowboy – hover in precise formation, as in a graduation ceremony, flying away from the camera and into the blue sky, a moment before they would crash into the sun-burned sand. Shades of Magritte, the French surrealist, but a sense of magic is evoked here too. Alien invasion also comes to mind, enhanced by the image of a flying saucer plunged into the soft sand, surrounded by a crowd of people. It is uncertain whether they are gathering around it or walking away. Is this crowd the fifth column in the show's title? A fifth column is a subversive force working inside the mainstream as an undercover agent, potentially harmful. It's hard to ignore Sher's interest in questions of immigration and foreignness versus the phobic societal imagination, perceiving immigrants as a threat.

Fifth Column

The dune is, without a doubt, the most noticeable image in the show. This image is much associated with the perception of place - the Middle East – and with its representation in 19th century photography. In many photographs taken in the colonialist tradition, 19th century Palestine was a land of dunes, an exotic desert, distinctly oriental. Surprisingly, in the minds of many Europeans Israel looks like that even today.

Sher creates Euro-desert hybrids in her photographs. In the one called "Grandma's Curtain," a young girl is wrapped in a curtain. It’s generic; an old person's curtain, or is it ethnic? You can find such curtains in a kibbutz, in an old-age home, or at the flea market. The girl rises Venus-like from the sands, a transplant in a foreign landscape.

A model of a Moscow icon, a colorful basilica, has emigrated from the Red Square in order to float above a dusty, sandy carpet. Six elegant men's hats – associated with an orthodox Jew, a gentleman, a cowboy – hover in precise formation, as in a graduation ceremony, flying away from the camera and into the blue sky, a moment before they would crash into the sun-burned sand. Shades of Magritte, the French surrealist, but a sense of magic is evoked here too. Alien invasion also comes to mind, enhanced by the image of a flying saucer plunged into the soft sand, surrounded by a crowd of people. It is uncertain whether they are gathering around it or walking away. Is this crowd the fifth column in the show's title? A fifth column is a subversive force working inside the mainstream as an undercover agent, potentially harmful. It's hard to ignore Sher's interest in questions of immigration and foreignness versus the phobic societal imagination, perceiving immigrants as a threat.

In another work, the same girl stands under a fancy crystal chandelier, a required trousseau item in the culture in which the artist has grown up. Two of its polished stones are placed right in front of the girl's eyes, transformed into cold, spellbinding drops of blood. This composition, which is repeated in another portrait of the young girl, this time with medals decorating the front of her black shirt, points to a generation gap and an identity conflict, and fashions Sher's complex and broken syntax whose raw materials are alienation and rootlessness.

Yair Barak