Overview
Grab your Kleenex, team. This one is a tear jerker. Seriously movie worthy. Potentially sadder than The Boy in Striped Pyjamas. Here goes: A twelve year old Ayala Gazit learnt that she had a long lost older brother, James, whop was the love child of her father and an English woman who resided in Australia. Ayala subsequently became obsessed with the idea of James, and meeting her alienated sibling. Before getting the chance to meet her brother, she found out that he committed suicide in 1996.
And so the Was it a Dream exhibition was born. Ayala used money she had received through the Tierney Fellowship to travel across Australia in search of traces of James. She found family snapshots, conversational quotes, letters and pictures she took herself of the places her brother had been. The exhibit emits emotions of fragmentation, loneliness and loss. Each image adds to the overall puzzle, that is the brother she never met.
Ayala began shooting as a military photographer at 18 years old when she was drafted to the Israeli Army. Following this, she graduated from The School of Visual Arts in New York with a BFA in photography. She used the money from her Honours degree to initially fund her brother-hunt, and help her develop the exhibition that will be featured in the Auckland Festival of Photography.