Glass II (Verre II)

Moshe Ninio interrogates the image: its status, its presence, its relation to the viewer. Glass II is a photograph of the dock that housed the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. The image thus has the appearance of a documentary photograph, an archival document even. Yet the emptiness of the dock and the point of view adopted mar the apparent clarity: the transparent glass of the dock, seen through the glass of the frame, gives onto a white wall that might be the wall on which the work is hung. The artist thus presents us with a paradoxical image that represents a historical fact through the notion of absence.