תחנת החלל בגדד | Baghdad Space Station | المحطة الفضائية بغداد

The exhibition Baghdad Space Station offers a visual journey that moves within the space between memory and fiction. Baghdad, the childhood city of Gavish’s grandparents who immigrated to Israel in the 1950s, is not presented in the exhibition as a geographic location or an archival historical testimony. Instead, it appears as a narrative space constructed from processed memory.

Within the exhibition space, the city of Baghdad unfolds as a multi-layered installation functioning as a poetic memory machine. It oscillates between a real past and an imagined present. This is the city as it was told, remembered, and preserved, but not necessarily as it truly was. Gavish does not attempt to reconstruct a city he never visited. Rather, he distills from the various stories heard in his childhood home a new narrative that lacks historical fidelity but holds strong cultural resonance.

The exhibition creates a territory that sits in between. It is not a representation of a place, but a conceptual gesture that defines a place as an invented memory. Gavish deconstructs the image into its basic components — pixels, lines, sounds — and reconstructs from them a symbolic space where imagination and memory serve as a dual mechanism for shaping identity.

Between animation and augmented reality, between hand-drawn lines and digital imagery, a new drawing of a family narrative begins to take shape. This is an invented, mockumentary, and unstable genealogy. The digital ruins, the audiovisual layers, and the motion of translation between mediums all chart poetic coordinates of a place that never existed, but perhaps could have.

Baghdad Space Station functions as an imaginary broadcast point from a frontier zone of identity. It is a space where Gavish outlines a futuristic Middle Eastern fantasy, a time loop, and a shifting frequency of elusive identity that never fully settles and is constantly reformed with each new viewing. It sketches a fragmented narrative woven from a disrupted present, one that questions the memory of a home once located in a foreign land.
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Erez Gavish is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and animator. From 2018 to 2024, he served as Head of the Department of Visual Communication at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. His work combines a variety of creative fields including illustration, graphic and typographic design, animation, coding, video, post-production, and visual effects.

Gavish explores the expansion of visual media and examines the connections between technology, narrative, and identity. This exhibition continues a line of inquiry that began with his previous show Aguda Culture, curated by Prof. Merav Salomon, which dealt with fragmented narratives, storytelling processes, and the tension between personal memory and fiction, between biography and visual tradition.