Images of Israel traveling across China

April 8, 2009 - 9:26 AM by Harry · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, History and Culture, Holidays, Israeliness, Life, Politics, Pop Culture, Travel 

Sally Macklef's CactusPassover in the Far East? Old news. Israelis are known for traversing the world with nothing but backpacks. It was on a trip like this that Tel Aviv’s Sally Macklef fell in love with her camera as a conduit for artistic expression.

Now Macklef’s work has come full-circle, with her images joining those of 59 other Israeli artists to form Inside Israel, an exhibition which opened at the Three Gorges Museum in the Chinese city of Chongqing in December and is set to travel to the region’s leading museums and cultural institutions for the remainder of the year.

This isn’t the first time that Israeli art is being exported to China en masse, and the exhibit comes in the context of increases in Israeli-Chinese tourist and cultural cooperation over the past year.

Macklef’s work often portrays Tel Aviv as a place where the balance of ancient life gets lost in the shuffle of today’s concrete wastelands (pictured is her disaffected work Cactus), but her Inside Israel images of Hassidim performing holiday rituals come decidedly from a place of inspiration and appreciation, as she explained recently to The Jerusalem Post:

“All this happiness fascinates me, this power of community,” Macklef explained. “I realized that when you’re not happy, you can’t believe in God.”

Inside Israel’s 180 pieces depict our country as a place where natural wonders, community, contemporary urban life, ancient ethnicities and architectural marvels can be observed, as curated by Three Gorges Museum staffer Yang Chaupang and Israeli art scenesters Doron Pollack, Iris Elhanani and Esther Dollinger.

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Refugee photography

January 29, 2009 - 2:18 PM by Harry · 1 Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Immigrant Moments, coexistence 

Active VisionSince late 2006, an estimated 10,000 African refugees and asylum seekers have arrived in Israel, crossing the border with Egypt on foot. After a long period of not knowing what to do with these people, several governmental bodies have since begun assisting them via a variety of humanitarian projects.

NGOs have been paying attention as well, with initiatives like Fugee Fridays organizing grassroots efforts to bring food from the Carmel Market to hungry refugees. A related organization, called ActiveVision, offering activities and workshops for refugees in the digital visual media arts. Since the late summer, one workshop project called “Asylum City” has taught a group of pupils how to operate still and video cameras as tools for conveying a message. Assignments mostly focused on documenting the community of asylum seeking families living in Tel Aviv, with the results yielding a print publication and a photo exhibition.

As Fugee Fridays co-founder Daniel Cherrin puts it in a recent piece for Haaretz,

The [Asylum City] course was extremely successful and instructors were able to teach the importance of filmmaking and storytelling both in theory and in practice. As a result, some very interesting and important films were produced. The group thus also actively takes part in spreading the awareness of their own situation.

Many of the older images from Asylum City can be seen here, while the latest batch, including profiles of some of the photographers, can be seen here. A slideshow of images from the workshops themselves can be seen here. Last week, a photo exhibition opened at the Shapira Quarter home of Y Circus.

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