Among other themes, Shir Shoval-Simhoni's artistic research focuses on repetition as a means of exploring the mechanisms of bureaucracy, movement, access and mobility, appropriating historical archives and personal documents within her work. The series presented here originated from the artist's old Polish passports, on whose pages she systematically printed archival images of her grandfather's childhood in Poland – a country he was forced to flee, thereby losing his right to citizenship. Images from his life are thus superimposed upon the very document intended to guarantee the right to belong and the freedom of movement. Joyful, everyday moments – wedding celebrations, photographs with classmates and an image of him looking through a telescope – overlap with the passport page's dense administrative framework.
The materiality of the document remains intact: the pages retain the features designed for security checks and fraud prevention. Page numbers, decorative motifs and the divisions between individual sections remain visible through the prints. This standardised apparatus of control thus becomes an integral part of the work. Displayed as sculptural objects on plinths, the pages catch the light, which passes through them to reveal the underlying coded language. In Yoram, Resting (2026), for example, the White Eagle (Orzel Bialy) – Poland's official coat of arms – is clearly visible, backlit within the print and hovering above the child's head.
In this striking juxtaposition, intimate family archives encounter the cold, efficiency-driven vocabulary of state control. The work occupies a space between restriction and freedom, between the document as barrier and the document as passage, questioning what a passport truly guarantees, and for whom. Citizenship emerges here as a fragile and arbitrary construct, one that can be revoked, contested or lost over the course of a lifetime. The work suggests that identity itself is mediated through bureaucracy, written and rewritten by shifting borders and political circumstances. From this perspective, belonging is never merely personal or familial: it is administered, stamped and perpetually subject to the redrawing of a nation's borders.
Shir Shoval-Simhoni (b. 2001) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin, working across textiles, printmaking and collage. She completed her bachelor's degree at King's College London. Her artistic practice explores repetition both as a material strategy and as a conceptual framework through which to examine labour, consumption and bureaucracy. Repetitive manual processes lie at the heart of her work, which encompasses textiles, screen printing, relief printing and collage. Her practice is further defined by the tension between the digital and the material – a dialectic she explores in both the form and content of her works by incorporating historical archives, personal documents and digital systems.
Her work has been exhibited at GlogauAIR, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Culterim Spaces and Garagen-Campus, all in Germany.
Text by Mirta Gianocca
(POLAND)