See Instructions for Mending the World by Harry Nankin from Thursday 29 February—Sunday 02 June.
The Jewish Museum of Australia: Gandel Centre of Judaica are thrilled to present Instructions for Mending the World by artist and writer Harry Nankin. Combining varied techniques of image-making, Nankin has created a vast collection of works which juxtapose images of deep space with impressions of cloth captured through a precise process of light exposure.
Nankin’s work examines connection and repair, reflecting on the mystical Kabbalist’s call for Tikkun olam: to ‘mend the world’. Invoking the expanse of the cosmos against the suggestion of interwoven threads to create fabric, Instructions for Mending the World invites us to consider what such repair implies.
‘Which film in each piece constitutes the “instructions” and which is for “mending” is undefined,’ Nankin says. ‘Just as what distinguishes the why from the how of reality remains unknowable to us now, and probably always will.’
Tickets to visit Instructions to Mend the World are on sale now.
For more details, read our media release here.
Image: Harry Nankin, The Veils 1 (SHEKKINAH), 2023.
Instructions for Mending the World opens Friday 29 February.
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For forty years, photographer, educator and environmentalist Harry Nankin’s focus has been our contested material, spiritual and ethical relationship with the non-human world. Pursuing an ‘ecological gaze’ he has recorded the shadows of nature – ocean, rain, forests, live insects, the light of the stars – on photographic paper and film without a camera, just as the flash of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima caught the shadows of its victims at the instant of their perishing. Employing procedures that are as much land art, printmaking and ritual as photography he has ‘turned the landscape into the camera’. Harry is the recipient of multiple arts grants and his work has been exhibited, reviewed, short-listed for prizes or acquired for collections on four continents. To interpret the post-Goldrush landscapes of central Victoria where he now lives, in 2020 Harry returned to the film camera.