"'These Are Not My Images (neither there nor here)' is based on various modes of association between images and sounds. The issue of dislocation, displacement, is prominent in this video, both in the eastward journey and in the alternation of three voices, three stories, three distinct relationships to images. But there is more. Along with mobility, wandering in time and space, there is the investigation of the endurance of images. The death of images (the death of film, the destruction of archives, the erasure of past) is pronounced.

In this document, which could be called a quest for identity, the author detaches herself, cuts off from her material. Through this process, she becomes an observer: are we all not just more-or-less sensitive or impassive observers? The voiceover narration accompanying this journey encompasses initiation, reconciliation and return as well as a mourning ritual, and affords the work an almost apocalyptic tone. Looking. Seeing. Listening. Moving in a landscape. Moving in memory. Seeing from a distance. How to preserve the distance that makes things exist, a distance in time and space, so hard to gauge and recalibrate every time? Sounds, faces, voices, movements, landscapes, colours, associated with the languor of certain journeys where 'betweenness' or suspension predispose the observer to contemplation – these images interact.

This video can be interpreted as a reverie on the theme of displacement (journey, wandering, disorientation), or the workings of memory (modes of association between recollection and what is thought to be seen, observed for the first time) or as a reflection associated with the state of suspension and betweenness related to travelling, wandering and the echoing of emotional responses. The tape is also an investigation into the scope of images, the force with which they inscribe themselves within us or do not. Duration. What remains of a place visited several times over several years? Gestures, multitudes of hands at work: braiding a girl's hair, bathing sacred cows, sweeping the ground as though to chase a shadow, preparing food, weaving, cutting film during editing, hammering a nail. And also hands at rest, waiting. Children's gazes. Images, sounds that replace recollections; images that have transformed in time. Each of Irit Batsry's works takes time to detach itself from the reality from which it arises. What we see now no longer exists, but we tend to forget this.

The children are now adolescents; some have gone; houses have been destroyed; skills are disappearing. Time affects everything: faces, bodies, places, recollections. And there is light – a presence that Batsry has been mastering since her very first video experiments in the 80s. Light that makes matter appear, draws silhouettes, makes images exist, transforms everything into material. 'These Are Not My Images...' bespeaks this also. Batsry thereby proposes an investigation of identity based on the power images have to make familiar and destabilizing experiences resonate, on the experience of the present (all the simple, everyday gestures that are small rituals), as well as on a fascinating detachment from these very images. The work's strength resides in its essentially transitory dimension, produced by the oscillation between fascination and distancing of this fascination – for light, people's movements, landscapes shot in motion. A renewed present into which Irit Batsry beckons us."

"The soul of images, their essence, emanates from their history,
from the possibility to see them again and again,
each time leaving difference marks on the surface of perception".

- Irit Batsry

(translated from French by K. Fleming)