Dana Lev Levnat

The artist Dana Lev Levnat was born in 1978 in Haifa; she is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Photography Department, as well as the Bezalel master’s degree track. In 2013, she embarked on her “Permanent Vacation” photography project, leaving Israel to travel the world. The project is founded on one Levnat’s unspoken rules, whereby she is dutybound to post images on social media every two hours, and every image must document one moment of her last 24 hours. The project tracks countless subjects photographed daily by Levnat, and photographs not posted online are then added to a growing archive. The panoply of images this artist presents gives the impression that she photographs everything as she sees it. The camera is her means of testifying to every perception emerging in villages, cities, or along any path she traverses. However, this mass of images also creates a paradox – there are so many, it seems there will never be time enough to view them all, truly see them. This contradiction is conveyed forcefully in the project title – a “permanent vacation”, a clear impossibility in today’s economic reality.

Dana Lev Levnat supplies a quiet, daily stream of images – buildings, gardens, local cuisine, or portraits of the characters around her, such as the residents of the hostel she spent time in. With a title that escapes imagination, she creates an entity that is everlasting, inconceivable. Attempts to grasp this journey, always in segments extracted from the entire array, are an alert or reminder to viewers that this time without end is a part of life and can therefore be perceived by everyone through their own eyes.

CONTACT
levnatdana@gmail.com
www.instagram.com/permanenttvacation