Gaping View
Gaping View
2026, Hamecarer Gallery -1, Tel Aviv
Some landscapes can be read like maps, others can be read like bodies.
A body bears scars. It changes, heals, and opens up again. A landscape remembers, too. It stores layers of time, history, fear, and hope. It seems that every attempt to protect it leaves another mark.
Thus, the landscape gradually transforms from a living body into a fortified one.
The word “gaping” contains a contradiction. It describes both a wound and an opening. Something that was torn but is also exposed. It asks us to look inward, toward what remains hidden, while also revealing the traces left behind. In this exhibition, the landscape itself becomes an open wound – a space in which time, wars and man etch their mark.
Doron Oved returns to Kibbutz Hanita, the place where she grew up, from a position of attentive observation. She does not seek the dramatic event itself, but rather what remains in its aftermath. Her camera turns precisely toward the places where routine and everyday reality coexist in a single breath: a path among the trees, a border fence, the wall of a safe room, concrete barriers, the entrance to a shelter. For a moment, they all appear to be quiet images, yet they carry within them a long history of life on the border.
In Hanita, the concept of defense is not a passing event but part of the landscape itself. The kibbutz, founded as part of the Homa ve’Migdal (“Wall and Tower”) enterprise, was built from the outset around the idea of fortification. Over the decades, new layers of defense were added to the space: fences, shelters, weapon depots, tanks, fortified shelters, pillboxes, and safe rooms. These are no longer merely functional structures. They have become an architecture of memory—a visual language belonging to the place.
But alongside the concrete, nature keeps on growing.
The woodland paths are covered in shade; branches intertwine, creating spaces concealed from view. The vegetation seems intent on hiding, preserving, perhaps even protecting. Yet it too cannot erase the traces of human intervention. The trees cut down along the border, the exposed slopes, and the newly built walls alter the living body of the mountain. It seems as though the landscape itself has undergone surgery—a layer of skin removed so that it can see and be seen.
The work that gives the exhibition its title presents a slope exposed after the woodland was cleared along the Lebanese border in 2022. The mountain suddenly appears naked. The pale earth recalls a body stripped of its clothes, or a wound opened after a bandage has been removed. This is not an image of destruction, but of exposure. In an instant, the landscape becomes vulnerable, almost human. The sense of the body returns in the photograph of the safe-room wall positioned at the center of the gallery. The work is presented at human scale, so that visitors move around it as they would around a person. The concrete, casting marks, uprooted trees, and remnants of building materials are not concealed. On the contrary, they reveal the moment when protection has not yet become finished architecture, but remains raw material. A wall intended to protect becomes a body in its own right.
The concrete barriers placed along the security road also take on a human presence in Oved’s work. They evoke silent guards or faceless knights, turning their bodies toward the threat. They are not merely barriers; they embody an ongoing attempt to stand between home and danger. As they become increasingly commonplace, they merge into the landscape until we almost no longer notice them.
At the same time, the video work traces an endless journey along the border. The gaze is divided between the treetops and the security fence. Above, life continues to grow; below, the border repeats itself again and again. The movement leads nowhere; it creates a rhythm of life returning each day to the same line of fracture.
Even in her early works, photographed on an analog camera in 2008 on her way to study photography, Oved viewed the road leading out of Hanita as a space of possibilities. At the time, the old border fence could be seen alongside the road, almost absorbed into the vegetation. Today, it has been replaced by a tall fortification system and a continuous concrete wall. The place remains the same, but the landscape has changed completely. The photograph has become testimony to what no longer exists.
The work Shelter Corridor, photographed in 2010 and first exhibited in the 2018 solo exhibition Nearby Past at Gvul Gallery, returns the viewer to a formative moment from childhood. The shelter entrance is a threshold between worlds—aboveground and belowground. The shelter becomes a bodily memory, like a smell or a scar, bringing one back to a particular place and time through the senses.
After the residents of Hanita returned from their evacuation following the October 7 war, Oved returned to photograph the same place anew. She does not document the war itself, but rather the quiet changes it left behind: safe rooms added to homes, concrete walls, felled trees, exposed slopes, and a landscape rewritten.
Gaping Landscape is not an exhibition about a geographic border. It explores the boundary between security and vulnerability, between home and fortress, and between nature and human intervention. It asks what happens when defense becomes an inseparable part of the landscape; when the landscape itself bears the marks of its time.
Doron Oved’s gaze does not seek to resolve the tension between beauty and pain. It understands that, in life on the border, the two are inextricably bound together. Precisely through the silence, the trees, a familiar path, and a gray concrete wall, a landscape emerges that is not merely seen—but also remembers.
Alongside Oved’s works, the exhibition presents video and sound works by residents of Hanita, created in the documentary workshop “The Road to Hanita,” led by documentarian Ruti Pransdorf. The works address the period of evacuation and the return. Participants: Orly Solana-Kadosh, Esti Ben-David, Dora Solana, Tanya Kreingold, and Inbal Wiseman.
Curator Rita Kats, August 2026