Let it Fall

Jennifer Abessira defines herself as an image-maker rather than a photographer. Choosing not to step outside the image-saturated reality of photography, she continuously questions its claims to truth. The tension between fatigue from images and the persistent urge to produce them is the condition from which her work emerges. The theme of the seventh Jerusalem Biennale, De Profundis, resonates deeply with Abessira's way of working and frames her project Let it Fall. It calls for a descent beneath the surface; an excavation into the concealed, fractured, or unresolved. Since October 7, this quest has assumed acute urgency. What once lay underground - emotionally, culturally, symbolically - has surfaced with force, revealing layers of loss, instability, and fracture, alongside gestures of solidarity and moments of fragile hope. Abessira creates images by photographing printed matter, books, screens, architectural spaces, and everyday objects. Cultural memory is central to her work as she makes extensive use of reproductions from Western art history, encyclopedias, art books, and journals, treating them as active material rather than static references. In Let it Fall, the image operates de profundis: emerging from depth, bearing witness to what collapses, slips, or refuses to settle.