Dafna Shalom studied at the International Center for Photography in New York, and graduated from Hunter College with a degree in fine arts (1997). Her works are in private and public collections internationally. While living in New York Shalom assisted on contemporary art projects for the multimedia artist Oliver Herring and for the Public Art fund. Shalom’s works, conceptual and emotional, open questions on otherness, corporal fragility and identity. Shalom exhibited at venues such as The Minnesota Center for Photography, USA, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA, The National Gallery, New Delhi, The Petach Tikva museum, Israel, Haifa Museum, Israel, Camera Obscura, Tel Aviv, Israel, Clamp Art, New York, the Suzanne Dellal Performing Art Center, Israel, The Jewish museum, New York, CCCB Barcelona and more.
“It is the provisional, fragile nature of our identity that interest me--the accidental way our sense of self is continually being reshaped by the conditions in which we find ourselves; at a certain point, it belongs only by chance to the place from which it sets out. Using photography, video, and mixed medias I investigate the limits of our senses in relation to social and individual blind spots. I use minimalist visual gestures to subvert the familiar and dig beyond our immediate sight. I often refer to the meeting point between two strangers who “smell” each other like two animals and process information rapidly to determine “like and dislike” “trust and distrust“ “us and them”. Questions on learned and inherited ideas inform my work as well as the fracture between tradition and modernity, topography and biography. The studio practice includes long term, parallel projects where i develop aesthetic systems to existing cultural artifacts. Each project is an emotional, conceptual and spiritual experience to dig, pull, reflect and revolt.”