EBRAICA Festival

Waters to Waters – Back to Life?

Water is the source of life. From water we come. But can we ever return? This selection from Merav Maroody’s recent photographic oeuvre shows pictures that capture water, suggest its presence, or attest its absence. Her frames are ambivalent, holding an inner contradiction, posing a question: is it possible to ever go back – to life?

Maroody catches young men jumping towards water. Their bodies, half naked, are lobbed in the air, in anticipation of the splash that comes next. The camera freezes an Heraclitean moment, which can never be re-lived: we could not jump in the same rivers. Yet we see the wish to return to waters in the synthetic turquoise pools her lense finds, surrounded by green grass and grey skies, or on a dusty rooftop balcony. The water-drive reaches an absurdity, when three men sit in a pool, integrated in a boat that floats in the canal. A tension between artificial and natural builds up in the pictures, between lakes and seas and pools made of plastic. Maroody detects a desire for an oasis in the form of palm trees, in another balcony decorating an urban landscape, just above a McDonalds sign. As a flat wall decoration next to the heating, a palm tree admits its own fiction, as does a blue plastic shell on a suburban gate. Plastic, as a container, isolates water, it forms life’s border. It is dry, it is dead. Drier than the desert, or the blue smoke that looks like a waterfall in a green forest. Maroody shows us blue skies, as it reflects on a window. A frame – of anticipation.

Text by
Michal B. Ron