Collage is a technique which was used extensively in the early twentieth century and has found new life in contemporary art. It is often identified with an urban reality characterized by schism and overcrowding. In Zilberman’s work, the surface is metaphoric of the tension between nature and culture. It comprises a myriad of details, which are balanced by open landscapes, a monochromatic palette, and the images’ almost seamless integration into the landscape. At first sight, the landscape and the figures inserted within it seem coherent and whole. But a second look reveals the underlying aesthetics of disruption, which decontextualizes elements by detaching them from their origins.
Zilberman has been developing his own language steadily and methodically. The process by which he “composes words” entails numerous attempts at combining images together until they reach a point of no return. He ascribes great importance to his work process. He quickly scans book pages, locates the ones he deems most appropriate – depending on paper type and texture, as well as the image size and position – and then defaces and appropriates fragments from them. Finally, like an adept surgeon, he joins them together, creating a whole new, alternative reality. The materiality and condition of the printed papers, attesting to their former existence, are evident in the final image, expanding its meaning. The collage-making acts may be understood as challenging power relations within the cultural and social order.3 The surreal landscapes and hybrid figures may be read both as responding to a social and environmental state of affairs and as a reflexive contemplation on photography as a practice. While the size of Zilberman’s works usually reflects the original size of the books from which the collaged images were culled, his current exhibition comprises, for the first time, a site-specific work whose size corresponds to the museum space in which it is installed. Here, the collaged landscape grew “organically” and reached life- like dimensions.
Boris Groys claims, in his book Art Power, “The utopia of an eternal universal order has been replaced by the utopia of constant global mobility.” The nomadic theme finds expression in various aspects of this work process, also portraying the artist’s journey as a contemporary flâneur wandering among a multitude of images. The images are cut and combined with others in a way that makes their origin unclear while recontextualizing them in universal, intercultural settings. Like the travelogue of a flâneur or nomad, depicting his memories and impressions, the artist’s journey resonates with his moves, indicating points of severance and connection among the “treasures” he has gleaned from the originals he has visited. This gathering may be regarded as another practice of the nomad artist – that is, marking his territory or his ownership of the settings and objects he has come across in his journey.5 “The flâneur,” writes Groys, “does not demand of things that they come to him; he goes to things. In this sense, the flâneur does not destroy the aura of things; he respects them. Or rather, only through him do they come into being again.”
Zilberman’s work process is underpinned by a series of reproductions. The landscape portrayed is a blown-up reproduction of a collage, which was made by cutting and pasting fragments of readymade photographs which, themselves, are reproductions of a photographed original. In addition, over the panorama presented to the viewer hangs another layer of small, framed collage works. This long chain of reproductions detaches the image’s representation from its origin, thereby situating the work between then and now, and between place and no-place. The eyes of the figures are covered, releasing them from their concrete existence and allowing the viewer to project his or her own personal world onto them. In addition, this covering effect undermines our viewing, raising questions as to what transpires beneath the surface.
On the wall perpendicular to the panorama hangs a single collage showing a jacket-clad male figure with feathers covering his face. This is the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who pursued the meaning of the gaze and claimed, “… in order for me to be what I am, it suffices merely that the Other look at me. … If there is an Other, whatever or whoever he may be; whatever may be his relations with me, and without his acting upon me in any way except by the pure upsurge of his being – then I have an outside, I have a nature” (emphasis in original).
The panorama on the wall presents an inquisitive field of vision by again, each time re-encoding the details perceived and processing the images into a semblance of coherence. The various perception routes outlined through the panorama by the viewer’s gaze generate diverse syntactic, subjective image sequences, which continue being woven as long as the gaze lingers.

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