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The series of photographs called Bible Stories (2003-2006), made by the photographer Adi Nes, offers a visual interpretation of the biblical narrative as a source for a critical reflection on contemporary culture. The Bible Stories series uncovers the aesthetic, ethical and social codes of the current visual culture. Nes processes the biblical text and rereads it via photography. The renewed appearance of the bible stories connects contemporary photorealism with the tradition of biblical illustration. The contemporary appearance and interpretative recomposition of the biblical episodes invert the hierarchies exemplified in some of the stories, and restructure the apparent gender relations, opening up a way to societal Others in the present, and conscripting the transcendent status of the text in order to criticize contemporary culture through the creative act.

It has been over a decade since the publication of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, yet the notion of “bare life,” evolved from the scathing biopolitical political analyses of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault, has gained theoretical momentum in art and critical discourse only recently.1 At the same time, its increasing deployment in these arenas has, for better or worse, risked diluting the concept into a synonym for a quasi-existentialist subjectivity; the resulting pluralism has tended to neutralize the concept.2 In the following argument, by contrast, I will try to locate a critical position in both the visual and the theoretical fields in order to resituate the biopolitical force of bare life.

The future as an event cannot be analysed solely through its simple relation to the known or recognized world, but through its unexpected dimensions: its being beyond history and the way it performs commandments and ethical obligations. Two visual interpretations of the biblical story of Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, by Eugène Delacroix and Paul Gauguin, are at the centre of my discussion. The main theoretical tool for discussing the issues of time and the future is the philosophical writing of Emmanuel Levinas.

Modern art traditionally tends to deal with the question of place in the theme of landscape taken from life. On one hand, the meaning of place is a result of seeing nature as the other of culture (thus lending nature meaning by opposing it to industrial culture), and on the other, place acquires meaning as an object existing within culture. In modernity, following the Romantic depictions of landscape in the early nineteenth century, landscape was reborn as a painterly, social agenda by the Impressionists, but the roots of landscape painting are of course much earlier. The Impressionist place is a space shared by the painter with the social mileu in which he lives; this place includes urban life as well as poppy fields in nature in the most primary sense (allegedly with no allegorical or symbolic meanings). Into the twentieth century, painting continued to present landscapes according to the understanding whereby the artist, and the place represented, gradually emerge on the canvas in continuity with each other. These paintings report on the place from within: the artist paints the place and he is part of it. As I discuss below, the new, digital media art as well as new painting done in the digital age operates from within a different paradigm, in which the account of what is seen, the representation of place, the discovery of its topography (whether using digital or other tools), occurs outside of the place.1 Landscape has become a prevalent theme in contemporary Israeli newmedia art. Landscapes appear at times to resemble a molecular map of digital particles, or a picture of energetic mass, unfolded in space. These imaginary landscapes do not present a picture of a concrete space, there is no identifiable mountain or familiar sight from the countryside, and it sometimes seems as though the works have been deliberately emptied of any recognizable images and loaded with microbial, digital traces that are difficult to interpret. Digital works of art amplify concepts of time, space, color and movement, and harness them to an enticing but at the same time off-putting technological dazzle. The questions we should answer are to do with the meaning of landscape in these works of art, and the coordinates by which we are to read them. Journal of Jewish Identities 2009, 2(2)

A group of twelve actors dressed in black sits scattered among the audience which surrounds an empty, brightly-lit platform. An actress gets up from her place within the audience and slowly starts ...