Anne Simin Shitrit: Malachi

Alongside portraits of young men associated with the fringes of the Hilltop Youth movement in the Jericho area in the West Bank, the exhibition presents portraits of Bedouin youths from the same region as well as young men from Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Rather than distinguishing between them by name or geographic location, Shitrit highlights their similarities. By withholding conventional identifying information, through which we impose order and hierarchy on the world, she 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 takes shape. The desert grants the figures a sense of rooted, historical belonging. The exhibition title, “Malachi” (Hebrew, my angel) echoes the biblical connection to the region, suggesting both a protective angel and the prophet of doom, whose book concludes the Trey Asar. This duality runs throughout the exhibition, lending it a quiet poetic power.

Anne Simin Shitrit, born in Jerusalem (b. 1994), 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 of Me’a She’arim, she experienced firsthand cultural, religious, and racial tensions. Leaving her family home and the Orthodox 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.