Ronit Porat /IL/
“I Never Knew Him”
“This project started after my research at the Roja archive that is in the Roja Marine Fisheries Museum. I was focusing on the interwar period from Roja with a combination of the Atpūta (Vacation) Latvian magazine from the 1930’s. I noticed that many houses and buildings in Roja are abandoned, they all seemed to have a life long time ago. I decided to make a collage for 7 windows that is a combination of Roja’s life and my own imagination using images from the magazines and motifs from nature like birds, flowers and fisherman. I named my work I Never Knew Him which refers to my grandfather who was born in Riga until he had to leave to Israel.”
Ronit Porat is an artist who works mostly on ready-made images of visual sources and archival materials, with which she examines historical artistic representations. Porat’s works can most accurately be described as stories about photography. She is mindful of the power of the medium, and her work raises a question at its core: who owns a photograph – the photographer, the subject, the archivist, or the viewer?
