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Clockwise: Art World POV by Oren Fischer; War Diary series by Emi Sfard: ‘12.11.23 We sewed life-saving vests. When we moved onto pro-combat projects it stuck in my throat…’, ‘13.11.23 I woke up early in the morning from the hum of a mosquito that turned into this hum in the sky that appeared with the outbreak of the war. Then I thought about all of those who wake up from a different hum’ in an image everything happens simultaneously. For me, that is truer to reality – we experience many things at once. The work by Adi Drimer speaks to that. [Her work shows the messages from a What’s App group of Kibbutz Re’im residents as the attacks were happening, arranged as a spiral of words.] It is hard to read because you need to turn the page or turn yourself, and that reflects the lack of clarity, order and sense of what was going on. There was also a need to document the attacks as they happened. overhaul [the year-long protests across Israel against the government bill that sought to curb the power of the Supreme Court]. When protests broke out along Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway, dozens of artists painted a series of fists along the highway’s embankment. Artists from the religious right approached this from the opposite direction: reflecting opposition to the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the desire to change the judicial system that (partly) stemmed from this. An exhibition at Geula Gallery in Jerusalem, called Fractures, was illustrating this right up to 7 October. PW: When did you start noticing that art was being influenced by the events of 7 October? SH: Soon afterwards, I noticed a flood of images on social media engaging with what was going on alongside art initiatives to support those in need, such as fundraising, offering art classes and alternative gallery spaces for the artists affected by the attacks. PW: Which themes began to emerge? SH: I noticed that artists were depicting the need to keep their hands moving. They were using things you find at home, such as marker pens or embroidery thread. The works were small, intricate and time-consuming, for example Daniella Meller’s piece, I Saw Cows Walking Among The Bodies, which is embroidered on delicate gauze bandage. It was as if artists wanted to have their hands busy to quieten their minds and hearts. There were also lots of art history references, including Picasso’s Guernica, which was reimagined in Israeli Guernica by the Ukrainian artist Zoya Cherkassky. Perhaps Israeli artists needed to place themselves within a historical story: we are often preoccupied with questions about where we belong. Are we part of the international art world or are we a part of our national story? Many of the works took the form of a diary or daily task, such as the series of images by Emi Sfard. These were about being repetitive, marking the days, bringing order during a time of chaos. PW: One piece created after October was a work by Shai Yehezkelli, where a classical landscape is obscured by an abstract burst of red. SH: Its title is Bus Explosion. It is a very powerful work referencing the terror attacks on buses in Israel [mostly by Hamas] of the early 2000s. It acknowledges the way accumulated trauma surfaces as well as the ongoing need for order, and to understand that the current war did not come out of nowhere. PW: Tell me about the works that came out immediately after 7 October, such as the artwork featuring messages from Kibbutz Re’im? SH: This is a very powerful way to understand the importance of art. Words are linear, and linear structures lend themselves to hierarchy, whereas PW: Some of the art seems to be intended for an internal audience – often using Hebrew – while some is for the world outside Israel … SH: Many people outside Israel don’t fully realise what happened here, and many people in Israel don’t fully realise what is going on in Gaza. The art community has, for many decades, belonged to both communities – the national and the international. But now the Israeli art world is experiencing a rift with the international art world, which it has always seen itself being part of. It brings disillusion on so many levels. There is the disillusion that we are safe and strong, which is felt by the whole country, but there’s also the disillusion about what peace now looks like. PW: Can art be used to explore some of those grey areas? SH: There is no grey area about what happened on 7 October and there is no grey area about what is happening in Gaza now. There is a constant pressure to sound balanced – I feel that myself. But art is a moment when somebody is expressing themselves from one specific point of view at a specific point in time. Art has permission to do that. PW: How has your own work changed since those initial drawings – are you still using red? SH: The drawings came out and out and out and then they stopped. I am waiting to see what will come next. I don’t know what that will be. That is always true – as an artist and a human being. It feels even more so today. n October Seventh is running at ANU Museum of the Jewish People. anumuseum.org.il. Peter Watts is a journalist and author. His latest book is Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound, Paradise Road, 2023. I S FA R D ; E M I S C H E R FO R E N 16 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024
page 17
I L B E R M A N ZG A S TO N POSTCARD FROM THE TURCO TRAIL PASSPORT Ruta Nacional 40 is the longest and most famous road in Argentina. Stretching for more than 3,000 miles, the highway crosses the country from bottom to top – traversing the windy Steppe of Patagonia before snaking up along the edge of the Andes, past hidden glacial lakes and snow-capped peaks, through vineyards and green orchards and river valleys, and into the high desert, ending at the border with Bolivia. It feels, in some places, like one of the remotest roads in the world, a seemingly endless stretch of stunning landscapes and abundant wildlife. Along Ruta 40 in Patagonia, huemul deer, ostrich-like rheas and guanacos (camelids native to southern South America) dart in and out of the sagebrush. Shepherds on horseback corralling hundreds of woolly sheep stir up little sandstorms, cloaking the horizon in haze and dust. In the north, the road winds through mountain towns at dizzying Jordan Salama follows the ghost route of his great-grandfather, a Syrian merchant, across the Argentine Andes altitudes, past salt flats and coppercoloured canyons. “Surely your great-grandfather would have seen this, and been amazed” – people said this to me all along Ruta 40, where I had come in search of a curious family history. In the 1920s, when today’s highway was but a few disjointed mule trails, my greatgrandfather Selim Salama travelled as a salesman along the northernmost part of its route. Selim was a Syrian Jewish immigrant to Argentina, who peddled his wares from a horse-drawn cart across more than 1,000 miles of mountains, valleys and high deserts, between Mendoza (the capital of the central-western province of the same name) and the border with Bolivia. Some 100 years later, I had come from New York to follow in his footsteps, looking for his traces in the most unexpected of places. I quickly realised that Selim wasn’t alone in his pursuits. In those days, it was quite common for Jewish and Christian immigrants from the Middle East to work as peddlers in Argentina. Indeed, many of them had done the same in Ottoman Syria, as merchants on the great Silk Road, where they traded in Turkish spices and Persian rugs and wool from the Steppes of Central Asia. Selim grew up in the old Jewish quarter of Damascus, which was home to one of the oldest continuous Jewish communities in the world – a mixed population of Sephardi Jews descended from those expelled from Spain and Arab Jews indigenous to the region for some 2,000 years. Turn-ofthe-century immigrants – of Jews and all backgrounds and religions – hailing from places such as Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut and Jerusalem in the Ottoman Empire, began to leave in waves as the empire fell apart. They came to be known as turcos (Turks) because of the Ottoman passports they carried. The misnomer persists to this day in Argentina, where some 16 percent of the country’s 200,000-strong Jewish community claim non-Ashkenazi SPRING 2024 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK 17 A R G E N T I N A

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Clockwise: Art World POV by Oren Fischer; War Diary series by Emi Sfard: ‘12.11.23 We sewed life-saving vests. When we moved onto pro-combat projects it stuck in my throat…’, ‘13.11.23 I woke up early in the morning from the hum of a mosquito that turned into this hum in the sky that appeared with the outbreak of the war. Then I thought about all of those who wake up from a different hum’

in an image everything happens simultaneously. For me, that is truer to reality – we experience many things at once. The work by Adi Drimer speaks to that. [Her work shows the messages from a What’s App group of Kibbutz Re’im residents as the attacks were happening, arranged as a spiral of words.] It is hard to read because you need to turn the page or turn yourself, and that reflects the lack of clarity, order and sense of what was going on. There was also a need to document the attacks as they happened.

overhaul [the year-long protests across Israel against the government bill that sought to curb the power of the Supreme Court]. When protests broke out along Tel Aviv’s Ayalon Highway, dozens of artists painted a series of fists along the highway’s embankment. Artists from the religious right approached this from the opposite direction: reflecting opposition to the disengagement from Gaza in 2005 and the desire to change the judicial system that (partly) stemmed from this. An exhibition at Geula Gallery in Jerusalem, called Fractures, was illustrating this right up to 7 October.

PW: When did you start noticing that art was being influenced by the events of 7 October? SH: Soon afterwards, I noticed a flood of images on social media engaging with what was going on alongside art initiatives to support those in need, such as fundraising, offering art classes and alternative gallery spaces for the artists affected by the attacks.

PW: Which themes began to emerge? SH: I noticed that artists were depicting the need to keep their hands moving. They were using things you find at home, such as marker pens or embroidery thread. The works were small, intricate and time-consuming, for example Daniella Meller’s piece, I Saw Cows Walking Among The Bodies, which is embroidered on delicate gauze bandage. It was as if artists wanted to have their hands busy to quieten their minds and hearts.

There were also lots of art history references, including Picasso’s Guernica, which was reimagined in Israeli Guernica by the Ukrainian artist Zoya Cherkassky. Perhaps Israeli artists needed to place themselves within a historical story: we are often preoccupied with questions about where we belong. Are we part of the international art world or are we a part of our national story?

Many of the works took the form of a diary or daily task, such as the series of images by Emi Sfard. These were about being repetitive, marking the days, bringing order during a time of chaos.

PW: One piece created after October was a work by Shai Yehezkelli, where a classical landscape is obscured by an abstract burst of red. SH: Its title is Bus Explosion. It is a very powerful work referencing the terror attacks on buses in Israel [mostly by Hamas] of the early 2000s. It acknowledges the way accumulated trauma surfaces as well as the ongoing need for order, and to understand that the current war did not come out of nowhere.

PW: Tell me about the works that came out immediately after 7 October, such as the artwork featuring messages from Kibbutz Re’im? SH: This is a very powerful way to understand the importance of art. Words are linear, and linear structures lend themselves to hierarchy, whereas

PW: Some of the art seems to be intended for an internal audience – often using Hebrew – while some is for the world outside Israel … SH: Many people outside Israel don’t fully realise what happened here, and many people in Israel don’t fully realise what is going on in Gaza. The art community has, for many decades, belonged to both communities – the national and the international. But now the Israeli art world is experiencing a rift with the international art world, which it has always seen itself being part of.

It brings disillusion on so many levels. There is the disillusion that we are safe and strong, which is felt by the whole country, but there’s also the disillusion about what peace now looks like.

PW: Can art be used to explore some of those grey areas? SH: There is no grey area about what happened on 7 October and there is no grey area about what is happening in Gaza now. There is a constant pressure to sound balanced – I feel that myself. But art is a moment when somebody is expressing themselves from one specific point of view at a specific point in time. Art has permission to do that.

PW: How has your own work changed since those initial drawings – are you still using red? SH: The drawings came out and out and out and then they stopped. I am waiting to see what will come next. I don’t know what that will be. That is always true – as an artist and a human being. It feels even more so today. n

October Seventh is running at ANU Museum of the Jewish People. anumuseum.org.il. Peter Watts is a journalist and author. His latest book is Denmark Street: London’s Street of Sound, Paradise Road, 2023.

I S FA R D

; E M

I S C H E R

FO R E N

16 JEWISHRENAISSANCE.ORG.UK SPRING 2024

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