Zehava Tarfa's work is like a careful acrobatic movement on a tightrope, hopping between two parallel worlds: the world of everyday reality and the fantastical one she creates for herself. This is an ongoing process that is present in every layer of her work - in her choice of subjects, in her photographic medium, and in her artistic practice. Fantasy does not serve as an escape from reality, but rather as a parallel space for action, a playground where imagination and desires take on a tangible presence.
Tarfa photographs her living space in Ashkelon, the city she arrived at when she immigrated to Israel at the age of one month and where she still lives today. She turns her gaze and camera to the interior of her home, the backyard, and the streets of her neighborhood. In her work, this familiar and intimate space becomes an open studio, a stage for both wandering and staged photography. The neighborhood - its housing projects and public spaces - is not photographed solely as a documentary site, but as a space charged with visual possibilities, where the everyday is imbued with a mythical dimension born of a personal gaze.
The twisting movement between extremes is also evident in Tarfa's material practice. She combines analog and digital photography, black and white with color. Some of the works undergo a process of manual intervention - cutting and pasting - which leaves traces of the hand and is enveloped in a unique aesthetic language. Photography does not end at the moment of exposure, but continues as a material, almost surgical act of dismantling and reassembling.
At the center of the exhibition are the handmade collages. Tarfa uses images of white women from the past, found online, which carry cultural codes of status and representation. She


removes their faces and exposed areas of their bodies. In their place, she inserts the faces of her family members, who are of Ethiopian descent, using old photographs from the family album, so
that their physical presence and skin tone are absorbed into the new image - a coronation that redefines relationships of representation, status, and belonging.
Alongside the collages are self-portraits and one of her mother, both with the gaze directed straight at the camera. These are moments of direct presence, allowing a respite from fantasy and returning the gaze to the real body and the intergenerational connection. A key image in this body of work is a portrait of Tarfa riding a cast-iron horse between residential buildings. Placing the image of riding within the urban space subverts the expectation of a heroic or pastoral image and situates it within a concrete reality.
Tarfa's poems are integrated into the exhibition and appear alongside the images. Marzipan Reveries appear as a dreamlike, enveloping inner world, born of a childlike imagination, seeking to preserve a space where it is permissible to create a different reality. Tarfa recounts that, as a child, she used to walk fearlessly along the staircase railing from the top to the bottom; "the beginnings of a circus girl," as she puts it. These beginnings continue to resonate with her to this day, and this memory operates in her work, not as a physical act but as an ongoing creative action.