Jewish stories often consider the polarity of exile. With one hand they tend to ancestral wounds that compel the notion to shield and assimilate; with the other they knead an ancestral resilience that allows people to continually revisit actions, places, and objects as they fit into new spaces of care and translation. The Jewish portrayal of time is similarly elastic. Through repeated gestures sanctified by the setting sun, the past braids into the present, encouraging photographs woven with Jewish memories to mark time with open-ended narratives. 

Mirroring the ways that Jewish stories are shared, these images reject a static answer and repeat familiar symbols to stretch their hands across time, land, and set conclusions. Through photographs that explore Jewish narrative structures, iconography, and repetition, these images build rooted and incomplete worlds. To approach an image in this way is not only to ask what it looks like but asks, what does it remember like?

About the Artist

With Rifts and Collapses is the first-ever solo exhibition in New England by photographer Hannah Altman. This show is part of Gallery 263’s Exhibition Proposal Series, a competitive program juried by the staff and board of the gallery. In With Rifts and Collapses, Hannah Altman displays small and medium-scale images that consider Jewish storytelling and image making.

Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey who resides in Somerville, MA.  She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs interpret relationships between gestures, the body, lineage, and interior space. Altman’s work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Huffington Post, and British Journal of Photography. She received the 2021 Lensculture Critics’ Choice Award and the 2022 Portraits Hellerau Photography Award first prize. Her first monograph, Kavana, published by Kris Graves Projects, is in the permanent collections of the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library.