From "The Rewarding Cave" project.
Anan Tzuckerman's works incorporate exaggerated, troubling images of hallucinations and visions, fantasies and anxieties. Presented to the viewer with an immaculate finish, they criticize the body culture of a consumerist world. The photographs shown here are culled from two series: "Eliezer Blum's Project" and "The Rewarding Cave."
In each of the three works, the artist plays a protagonist wallowing through life's filth, creating a strong, sensationalistic, pathetic and theatrical image laden with troubling grotesque symbolism.
Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Odysseus returning to Ithaca, the grotesques paintings uncovered in Nero's pleasure villa, Freud's traumwerk and the cave as metaphor for the uterus - all come to mind when viewing these works. The blunt spectacularity, the image flickering from the dark - the "void," the "pit," the "tomb" or the "cave" - are all understood as parables of contemporary culture's pathologies. Text from the Haifa museum catalogue.