
Yishay Garbasz was born in 1970 in Israel, and studied photography at Bard College, New York. Her work delves with social themes such as families and human rights. For "In My Mother's Footsteps", she traveled to Berlin, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic to retrace her mother Salla's paths as described in her memoirs of surviving the Holocaust. Salla was born in 1929 in Berlin, and the age of 4, moved to the Netherlands with her family to escape the spread of National Socialism, only to be sent to a concentration camp in 1942. At the urging of her husband, who had also survived the Nazi persecution but in Poland, Sala wrote about her days until her release. She completed the book in 1995. Despite having been unable to read the book for some time, Yishay Garbasz eventually embarked on this project of both historical and personal significance, in her attempt to fully understand her mother's history and her own. Using a heavy, large-format camera which requires one to focus on the subject with the utmost attention, Garbasz works with her mother's memory in order "to go back to collect [parts of her mother's soul]" that have been left behind; displayed in this show with respective texts, the images observe into the past through scars that are still present today.
In 2008 after finishing her residency in Taiwan and exhibiting her project "In The Same House: Where a Family Lived for Four or More Generations" at the Hakka Museum in Meinong, and a permanent public installation in Jia Dong and a grope exhibition at Kio-A-Thau artist village. Garbasz proceeded to install her project 'In My Mother's Footsteps" in the museum of art in Chiang Mai Thailand.
In 2009 Garbasz's first book will be published by Hatje Cantz as well as exhibit and install her work at the Tokyo Wonder Site and Wako Works of Art.