Winner of the Prix Découverte Louis-Roederer 2020, Ilanit Illouz's Les Dolines series presents disturbing crystallized landscapes.

Saline soils covered with concretions or strewn with crevices and aquatic plants, photographed in close-up before being revealed in salt baths from the Dead Sea... the prints of this visual artist-photographer, with their crystalline shimmer, appear as allegories of the passing of time. Between mutation and disappearance, erosion and revelation. A poetic alchemy...  

Ilanit Illouz (b. 1977) has made salt, collected in the Judean desert near the Dead Sea, where thedrying up of the lake has transformed the region into a lunar zone, her tool of choice. Used in her studio, after she had photographed this valley ravaged by the over-exploitation of the Jordan River, to fossilize her prints, it appears both as motif and medium, "making the work sparkle at the same time as it freezes it". 

A "long-term plastic work" that the artist explains in the following terms: "I invested an area on the edge of Israel and the West Bank, the Dead Sea constituting a natural border between three countries (Palestine, Israel, Jordan). Two countries overexploit the area, while another lives there without the right to exploit its natural resources. The result is the creation of "sinkholes", holes that open up in the ground as the Dead Sea recedes. This water basin, the lowest in the world, is inexorably drying out. The multiplication of craters is one of the most alarming symptoms. As the water recedes, it leaves behind a terrain riddled with pockets of salt. On contact with freshwater, these can suddenly collapse, swallowing up anything on the surface. This territory, fascinating in many ways, becomes a veritable metaphor for memory [...]¹ ".

Allegories of disintegration 

Emerging from this decaying land, marked by the stigmata of time and erasure, the images in her Les Dolines series , undertaken since 2016, resonate particularly well in today's context... Chalky rock, crystallized waves, salt flats or aquatic plants framed in close-up appear like ghosts frozen in their gangue of salt. Collecting the organic and mineral traces of an exsanguinated earth, Ilanit Illouz not only warns of the ravages of extractivism, but, using salt to crystallize her images, also re-enacts the fossilization process at work. Giving an almost sculptural twist to her salt-crystal-encrusted photographs, she also gives them an allegorical dimension. An allegory of disintegration, of the collapse of soils (and nations?), but also of the dissolution of the image. It was the study of the origins of photography, through the use of Judean bitumen as a photosensitive material by Nicéphore Niépce, the inventor of heliography, back in 1922, that motivated the artist's first trip...  

Capturing the beauty of unstable places destined to disintegrate and collapse, Ilanit Illouz composes an ode to fragility and impermanence.