Yuval Chen is the winner of PHOTO IS:RAEL’s “Corona Challenge”, March 2020.
The project Light Refugees, created in the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, explores and marks realities of worlds, blending and unifying urban landscapes into a wild world, conveying movement towards one another to the point of an existential harmonious symbiosis, alongside an alien, sterile, apocalyptic aphorism.
At the core of the project stands the ambivalent and fraught relationship between man and his environment – egoistic, exploitative, and destructive but also a protector, researcher, and recycler. The technique and conceptual and visual aesthetics reflect time and space in an age of pandemic. The object, bat-pandemic, is an analogy and allegory for an existential situation.
Created during the coronavirus pandemic, Light Refugees indexically reflects an extreme catastrophic and apocalyptic situation, which allows us to directly look at ourselves and evokes soul-searching, towards a new ethic and a deep awareness of the earth.
*Photos from this project are exhibited these days in the Haifa Museum of Art.
Artist:
Yuval Chen
