Dana Darvish:
Actual Animals

During her stay in Arad, Dana Darvish found herself returning to one place: on the outskirts of the city, in the industrial area, near the factories and the main landfill, where feral dogs lived. They were not pets but neither were they wild animals.

Every evening, activists from the "Arad Lachay" animal welfare organization would come to feed and water these dogs, the outcasts, the expelled, who have been pushed beyond the boundaries of sight.

In what seemed like wilderness and arid land, mounds of abandoned remains and alien industrial buildings,

Darvish's looked at the lives of the outcast dogs, revealed to us powerful, proud, and humble forces of survival, compassion, family ties, and friendship. 

 

This series of photographs has raised the issue of animal rights – an area in which Israeli society and legislation lag behind other states.

But Darvish's loving photography, which respects distance, does not respond to the schemes of activist or documentary photography. It connects us to figures who are “at the same time creatures of an imagined possibility and a fierce and ordinary reality" – actual dogs, singular figures of flesh and blood.

Having become real subjects, these dogs ask us to consider the social struggles of every living soul, whatever it may be, as well as questions of sovereignty, ownership, exclusion, and freedom. In essence, this series of works addressed ethics and humanity, in their most fundamental and complicated meanings, and had formulated a complex and unpredictable representation of freedom.