CULTURE - Israel: An Introduction - page 304

In his work Isaac Isaac (1982), Gershuni refers to the Biblical story of the binding of Isaac in
the context of the First Lebanon War. Gershuni moves between the abject and the sublime,
Christianity and Judaism, rationalism and emotionalism.
The 1982 Lebanon War and the First Intifada inspired critical political messages. David Reeb,
for example, created a long series of paintings based on superimposing the violent reality in the
West Bank and the Gaza Strip on the calm reality within Israel. Reeb painted cartographic im-
ages of Israel without including the territories captured since the 1967 war. In his work Green
Line with Green Eyes (1987), he contrasted the Tel Aviv shore with a scene from the intifada.
The painting is covered with images of eyes staring back at the viewer. He uses the colors of the
Israeli and Palestinian fl ags and hints at a spreading blindness. Created by Pamela Levi in 1983,
following the Lebanon War, Dead Soldier Painting depicts the nonheroic presence of death.
Photography
Another important development of the 1980s was the rising status of photography. Adam
Baruch, Anat Saragusti, and others equated documentary photography with art and gave it
an important role in describing political and social reality. Micha Kirshner shot a portrait of
Aisha El-Kord from the Khan Yunis refugee camp in a series of intifada portraits that he pho-
tographed in his studio. Aisha El-Kord was a child injured in the eye by a rubber bullet. She
appears in the photograph with her mother in a pose evocative of a pietà.
The contrast between calm life and violent instability is a common theme in works of this
period. A good example is Gal Weinstein's installation Slope , which depicts small houses with
red roofs buried in dark soot. The scene looks like Pompeii after the volcanic eruption, sug-
gesting that Israel is living its last days and will soon collapse.
Similar to this is Sigalit Landau's Swimmer and Wall (1993), in which a tiny shiny doll swims
into a wall, her head exploding in the violent encounter. The sweetness of the doll bursts when
it crashes into reality. The symbol of the decade, suggested the curator of the 1990s exhibition
at the Herziliya Museum of Contemporary Art, was youth aware of its own transience, of its
own mortality. In a confrontation with death, there is an attempt to hold onto youth while
maintaining awareness of the inferno to follow.
Khaled Zighari's Head to Head (1995) presents a soldier and a Palestinian civilian facing off.
They are twins in a dance. A later version of this duet can be seen in Sharif Waked's Jericho
First (2002), a series of thirty-two paintings whose point of departure was an image from the
Hisham Palace in Jericho depicting a lion attacking a doe. The series develops as the violent
act proceeds, and the images become denser until at the end, the lion and the doe become one
body in which one can see the hanging leg of the doe. The image hovers between comic strip
and abstract painting and represents a violent, mythical world fi lled by confl icting concepts of
strong and weak, good and evil.
In 1997, Meir Gal exhibited Nine Out of Four Hundred: The West and the Rest . This is a color
photograph that portrays the artist bursting from a dark background or perhaps immersed
in darkness. The artist holds in his hand a history book from the 1970s, written by Shmuel
Kirshenbaum. Of 400 pages, only nine are dedicated to the history of non-European Jews, and