Anne Simin Shitrit: Malachi

Shitrit photographs young men associated with the fringes of the Hilltop Youth movement near Jericho in the West Bank, alongside Bedouin youths from the same region, as well as young men from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. By withholding conventional identifying information through which we impose order and hierarchy on the world, Shitrit disrupts the viewer’s ability to classify the subjects according to national or ethnic categories. Despite the tenderness and beauty conveyed by the images, a subtle sense of unease begins to surface.

The desert landscapes and wild nature complete the exhibition's visual syntax. More than a backdrop, they serve as a formative space in which the young men’s identity and worldview take shape. The desert grants the figures a sense of rooted, historical belonging. The exhibition title, “Malachi,” means "my angel" in Hebrew – a protecting presence – but it is also the name of the last prophet in the Bible, a prophet of doom and admonition. This duality runs throughout the exhibition, lending it a quiet poetic power.

Anne Simin Shitrit (b. 1994, Jerusalem) grew up between different worlds, with a sense of otherness enveloping her like a second skin. As a child of ba’aley teshuva (newly observant Jews) of Iranian and Moroccan descent, raised in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, she experienced cultural, religious, and racial tensions. Leaving her family home and the religious education system at fourteen, set her on a constant negotiation between opposing worlds and a search for a language capable of expressing the disparities she encountered.

In a reality where we tend to identify and label the “other” with certainty, Shitrit challenges the conventions that shape our world, offering a different way of seeing. Through her lens, everyone is native to the place: dressing, eating, speaking its language, and abiding by its codes, in which only the strongest survive.