While most of the exhibits in the Oasis Art Gallery are group exhibits featuring the work of Palestinian and Jewish Israeli artists together, the past and present exhibits have been solo – one the work of a Jewish artist, the second Palestinian.
Dorit Bat Shalom: On the Path Between Grief and Hope. One walks into the Gallery to find a long wall in which photos – black and white with dashes of color added in a special printing process – printed on thin, skin-like paper, are hung from clothespins, crowded together, on strings. We are inside a work in progress, the photos, which seem to be of statues that are shedding tears or losing cement blocks, are a progression in which the colors of one blend through to the colors of the next, taking one on an emotional journey.
Bat Shalom, a peace activist, has been a friend of the gallery since its inception, and Gallery curator Dyana Shaloufi Rizek wrote: “Most of the art works are and expression of the grief, pain, anger, shame, sorrow, and the rupture that Dorit Bat Shalom experienced during the two years of war. Dorit understood that she could not maintain her vision without going through the absolute shattering of that period and that which she has generally experienced throughout her entire life.”
From statues posed in lament or internal organs turned to stone, we come to a wall with images of eyes, and, finally, to two full-sized painting of young Palestinian women, a head with a butterfly and a peaceful collage in which the artist’s face peeps out. In a short tour of the gallery, we can thus take in the struggle of one artist, looking within and taking herself on a heroic journey, in black and white and color, from sorrow to the hope that we see in the peaceful, downcast gazes of the women on yellow, patterned grounds and the cheerful collage.
The exhibit closed at the end of January. While the artist could not make it to the closing talk, many others came to the event.
Raida Adon: Life View. Opened Feb. 5. Adon is a multimedia artist, director and actress. Born and raised in Acre/Akko, she is an alumna of the Bezalel Academy of Art, and today lives in France. She moves between modern European, and the Jewish, Israeli world, and the displaced Palestinian one, and, in her work, shows us what it is like to belong to many cultures and to none.
While much of the work exhibited in the gallery has an almost naive illustration style, or borrows themes from well-known paintings, on second glance, the colorful works are unsettling. Adon has a message for us; she drawing us in only to show us the complexity and tension in her life – and in ours — and the deep substance held within each work of art.
Yet the work, in some sense, because it engages our emotions, is ultimately uplifting. At the same time, Adon, with her artistic language, continually asks of us to question our own reality.
Shaloufi Rizek writes: “Raida Adon displays the fear and unease that both peoples in this country experience, while letting us know she is not willing to fully identify with any. We also detect, within the compositions, her feelings of commitment and responsibility toward femineity and humanity. The emotional impact impels us to identify with her work, to let them touch our heart and to experience horror, introspection and love.”
The exhibit is open through June, by prior arrangement.
