b.1981, Jerusalem

“Lydda is where I go to think,” Dor Guez says of his ancestral home. After years spent living between New York and Jaffa, Guez felt compelled to make a permanent return. He lives not far from the church around which the life of his Christian Palestinian family and their community had, for centuries, revolved. “He saw himself as a rock in the landscape, and around him, everything was swirling,” Guez says of his grandfather’s experience of living in a territory whose people bear the incessant violence inflicted by disputing political masters. His practice is a constant dialogue between peeling and layering (peeling back that which has been covered over while layering the present with what has been removed – both history’s materials, and its narratives). Guez’ work evidences borders and their bleed, his practice a form of maintenance against the threat of erasure. What customs are carried across time, when multiple identities tesselate in one terrain?