Keren Gueller | Wet Collection

This series of stills, “Wet Collection”, was photographed in the fish collection at the Steinhardt Museum, which includes about 800,000 catalogued archive items.

Each catalogued fish undergoes a process of preservation in formalin and is transferred to a jar with alcohol that bears a tag with the collection data and species name. The jar is then placed on metal shelving in a space with a climate control system and cold fluorescent light.

In one of the collection rooms, which are a kind of “behind the scenes” of the Museum, the artist, Keren Gueller, built a professional set that resembles staged portrait photography in a studio. She brought jar after jar, hundreds of inanimate aquariums, to this set for inspection and photography, and created a new collection: a series of portraits.

The action of photography, which traps the fish beyond the transparent layers—the camera lens, the jar, the liquid, the framing glass—creates a new act of preservation. The photographed fish all face forwards, close up and magnified, and look at us with open eyes. The direct look by eyes that do not see perhaps reminds us that both their preserved body and the photos themselves will continue to exist long after us. We are the ones that are random and constantly changing.

The strong color of the fish slowly fades and almost disappears completely during the preservation process. It remains as a verbal description in the titles that Gueller has chosen for her works, which reflect the original colors of the fish. The titles, worded in a language taken from the world of abstract painting, combine truth and fiction and highlight the gap and the manipulative act generated by the text when it appears next to an image. And perhaps, it may be possible to see the original colors flash in the portraits for a split second, and immediately disappear.

 

Keren Gueller (born 1976), holds an MA in art from Bezalel in collaboration with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and an MA in art and art education from Hamidrasha—the Faculty of Arts, Beit Berl College, where she is a senior lecturer. She participated in Artport’s artist-in-residence program in 2021–2022.

Gueller creates mainly by video, sculpture and installation. Her works examine behavior and human environments, focusing on autobiographical content, texts and simple everyday acts. Through the tension between documentary and fiction they examine, break down and rebuild rituals and social constructs.

Gueller has exhibited in many solo exhibitions and group exhibitions in museums and galleries in Israel and around the world. She has won grants and prizes, including the Osnat Moses (z”l) Excellence in Art Prize, prizes from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Sharet Fund Excellent in Art Prize, and grants from the Lottery Council for Culture and the Arts, the New Fund for Film and Television, and the Fund for Independent Artists from the Ministry of Culture and Sport.

Currently, Gueller is participating in the Lottery Incubator for the Arts as well as exhibiting in the University Art Gallery at Tel Aviv University.