Winner of the 2020 Louis-Roederer Discovery Prize, Ilanit Illouz showcases in her series The Sinkholes disturbing crystallized landscapes.

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

Salt, gathered in the Judean Desert near the Dead Sea, where the lake's drying up has transformed the region into a lunar landscape, has become Ilanit Illouz's (born in 1977) preferred tool. Used in her studio, after she photographed this valley ravaged by the overexploitation of the Jordan River, to fossilize her prints, it appears there both as motif and medium, "making the work shimmer while simultaneously freezing it."

A “long-term artistic project” that the artist explains in these terms: “I have explored an area on the border between Israel and the West Bank, the Dead Sea forming a natural border between three countries (Palestine, Israel, Jordan). Two countries overexploit this area while another lives there without having the right to exploit its natural resources. This results in the creation of sinkholes, holes that open in the ground as the Dead Sea recedes. This body of water, the lowest point on Earth, is drying up inexorably. The proliferation of craters is one of the most alarming symptoms. As it recedes, the water leaves behind a landscape riddled with pockets of salt. Upon contact with fresh water, these can collapse suddenly, swallowing everything on the surface. This territory, fascinating in many respects, becomes a true metaphor for memory […] ¹ ”

Allegories of disintegration 

Born from this decaying land, marked by the ravages of time and erasure, the images in her series Les Dolines (The Sinkholes), begun in 2016, resonate particularly strongly in the current context. Chalky rock , crystallized waves , salt marshes , and aquatic plants framed in close-up appear like ghosts frozen in their salt matrix. Collecting the organic and mineral traces of a bloodless land, Ilanit Illouz not only raises awareness of the devastating effects of extractivism, but, by using salt to crystallize her images, also reenacts the process of fossilization at work. Giving an almost sculptural quality to her photographs encrusted with salt crystals, she also imbues them with an allegorical dimension. An allegory of disintegration, of the collapse of soils (and nations?), but also of the dissolution of the image. In fact, it was the study of the origins of photography, through the use of bitumen of Judea as a photosensitive product by Nicéphore Niépce, the inventor of heliography, as early as 1922, that motivated the artist's first trip…

By capturing the beauty of unstable places, since they are destined for disintegration and collapse, Ilanit Illouz composes an ode to fragility and impermanence.