Lilies of the Field #1, Bethlehem, Christmas Day,

2019–2020

In his photography-centered multimedia practice, the artist Dor Guez considers the roles of art, architecture, music, and monuments in shaping the identity of a place. His work is a form of storytelling that focuses on unwritten histories. Colony / Dor Guez features photographs, installations, and the US premiere of a video that the artist created based on historical photographs in the archives of the American Colony. Established in Jerusalem in 1881, the American Colony was a Christian community formed by a group of American and then Swedish expats who maintained their philanthropic commune through Ottoman, British, Jordanian, and Israeli rule. In the early twentieth century, the American Colony produced and sold hundreds of photographic views as souvenirs of the region. Guez mines these holdings, selecting photographs that contain latent histories of the multiple communities who draw connections between their identity and this geography. He mirrors, juxtaposes, enlarges, and filters these pictures to reveal how they accrue meanings over time and offer shifting views of the region’s past and present.