Not just walls: An exhibition on the home that remains in consciousness

What is a home – a physical place, a feeling, a memory, or perhaps a psychological mechanism that refuses to close? The dual exhibition “How Do You Say Home” by artists Yael Segal and Tal Nahum, currently on view at P8 Gallery in Tel Aviv, seeks to examine this elusive concept through photography, projections, and photographic collages, offering a complex perspective on nostalgia, loss, and the longing for return.

The two artists work from different points of departure, yet meet within the tension between home as a familiar place and home as a deceptive memory. Curated by Shirly Wagner, the exhibition emphasizes its dual reading: The desire to restore and preserve the home, alongside the understanding that it is always in a process of distancing and disappearance.

Tal Nahum works from an archival and deeply personal space. Memories of her grandmother’s home serve as a point of departure for works dense with details, objects, and textures. Her photographs are populated with inherited belongings – furniture, fabrics, household items, and decorative objects – crowded tightly together to create an almost suffocating sense of excess. Within this environment appear portraits of women and duplicated body parts, trapped among the furniture, as if absorbed into the space itself.

The repetitive actions of organizing, assembling, and collecting reflect a deep anxiety about empty space, and a persistent drive to revive what has been stored away in drawers and closets. In Nahum’s work, the home is not a place of rest but a charged arena of memory, compulsion, and unresolved emotion.

In contrast, Yael Segal presents a body of work that is entirely different in character: Photographs that emerge from darkness, obscurity, and layers. Segal photographs her childhood homes directly, then projects the images onto walls and various materials in the studio – a process that produces an additional dismantling of the familiar space. The result is a home that is “emptied of home”: Fragmented structures, sharp angles, cuts, and broken frames that undermine any sense of stability.

The dark photographs are punctuated by small details – shutters, cables, signs of decay – transforming the architectural image into a mental terrain. This is a home that exists through its absence, a memory that insists on appearing yet refuses to fully solidify.

Together, Segal and Nahum create a quiet yet powerful dialogue about the concept of home in an era of movement, fragmentation, and longing. The exhibition does not offer a single answer to the question “How do you say home,” but instead leaves the viewer in an in-between space – between objects and memories, between light and darkness, between the attempt to preserve and the recognition of inevitable loss.