“Postcards from Yesterday” is a permanent, site-specific installation commissioned by Muza, the Eretz Israel Museum. The work refers to the museum’s interdisciplinary approach and its historical collections of archaeology, ethnography, photography, folklore and more. It focuses on the photographic image, and explores its various roles in constructing a local visual language and shaping collective memory.
Vera Vladimirsky photographed artworks that were featured in past exhibitions and are now displayed on the pavilion curators’ office walls. She captured bulletin boards which depict miniature exhibitions, “curated” from invitations, souvenirs, postcards, and personal mementos, revealing the multilayered nature of the museum. These images were then assembled with pictures from MUZA’s photography collections, including postcards of various landscapes and sites. This process offered an exploration of different perspectives on the local environment and cultural sphere as represented by institutional, personal, professional and amateur photography. Vladimirsky photographed book displays and collections of material culture in the museum’s storage rooms, focusing on symbolic signifiers – photographs, inventories, and catalogue reference cards indicating the contents of cases, folders and cabinets. She thus reflects on the museum’s role as an institution that collects, preserves, and studies cultural artifacts, while unveiling what exists “behind the scenes.”
Vladimirsky photographed interiors and printed the images, combining them with photographs from museum collections to create three-dimensional assemblages, which she then re-photographed. The final work resembles a monumental “bulletin board,” forming a non-hierarchical encounter between images, whose layers both reveal and obscure meaning.
Presented on the wall opposite the main installation is a separate work, printed on wallpaper. Its repetitive pattern was created using photographs of olive leaves gathered in MUZA’s garden.
