Dor Guez’s artistic practice is at once forensic and personal. It culminates in installations of found objects as well as deeply textured “scanograms,” a term he uses to describe a unique digital imaging process. Born into a blended family of Palestinians and Tunisian Jews, Guez explores chapters of his own layered history to expose the hidden connections, subversive undercurrents, and present-day contexts of his family’s unique story, and that of the region he comes from. Oftentimes the point of departure is a seemingly modest treasure from the family archive—a vintage wedding photograph, a dress-maker’s pattern, or a notebook written in an ancient Judeo-Arabic dialect. Yet for Guez such relics are the stuff of expansive possibility.

Guez’s work plays on the tension between what one inherits—a language, a name, a place of origin—and what one reinvents over time. Stories are told and retold, and traces of the past are rediscovered, shedding light on little-known facts and familial chapters. Letters from the Greater Maghreb, reflects a pivotal moment in Guez’s family history, when his grandparents— who both worked in theater—escaped from concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Tunisia and later, in 1951, immigrated to Israel. In Tunisia, the artist’s grandparents ran the Jewish Theater, where plays were performed in Judeo-Arabic - a dialect that combines Hebrew and Arabic characters, and which is no longer in use today. His grandfather wrote the plays, while his grandmother was a lead actress and costume designer. Operating on multiple levels at once, Guez finds and resituates objects to reveal not only what from the past was lost but what has been largely forgotten or even consciously suppressed; the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, for example, is rarely addressed or publicly acknowledged. Yet his work allows these connections to emerge so poignantly because he cleaves so closely to the people whose lives they affected. In some instances his work quite literally fills negative space, as evidenced in his colorization and scanning techniques. It is in this unclassifiable realm—between the personal and the social, the found and fabricated, the seen and obscured—that Guez’s work gathers its force.

Letters of the Greater Maghreb by Dor Guez consists of scanograms of sewing patterns his grandmother brought with her when she immigrated from Tunisia to Palestine. These fragile patterns, tied to her work as a costume designer, reflect a personal and cultural history intertwined with migration and loss. The series highlights the delicate nature of these personal relics and the larger stories they tell.

Darsie Alexander , Chief Curator of the Jewish Museum New York