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About the Exhibition
Opening reception Thursday, December 3, 5:30 - 8:30 pm
Slought Foundation is pleased to announce The family:
a project of reconciliation. The family is a collaborative
project undertaken by a Palestinian artist, Khader Oshah,
and an Israeli artist, Haim Maor, Professor at Ben-Gurion
University. They have spent three years painting members of
each others’ families. The project displayed at Slought
Foundation features the artworks that resulted from this process.
However, it is more than an exhibition of art, and privileges
dialogue and cultural exchange as equally important gestures
of reconciliation between two cultures who in this moment
remain in perpetual conflict.
While it is generally discouraged today to reduce an artist
to his or her cultural milieu, there are however signs of
both cultures in these respective artists. And yet, though
their styles may differ, through the exhibition these two
attitudes become a single form. Maor, in his portraits on
irregular, found pieces of wood, paints members of the family
of Oshah, while Oshah’s work uses an expressionist style
to represent the family of Maor. Each portrait permits a reconstructed
and renewed sense of self, albeit through the eyes of the
other. In so doing, despite decades of Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, Oshah and Maor perform an intimate and personal
series of gestures that enable interaction on a human scale.
Without presuming to mitigate the conflict that gave rise
to the project, they nevertheless undertake a thought-experiment
concerning the possibility of reconciliation.
One of the underlying principles of this project is that
figurative painting becomes art only when the artist sublimates
that realism in the pursuit of something more important. Both
Oshah and Maor succeed here in using realism as the vehicle
for another task--namely, the idea of perpetual peace. Perhaps
the return today to realism in contemporary art is thus superficial,
without sufficient meaning or political responsibility.
This project has been curated by Osvaldo Romberg, taking
into consideration that importance of art as a means of cultural
exchange and reconciliation at Slought Foundation. In keeping
with this approach, a handout soliciting public comments on
the project will accompany the exhibition. A representative
group from those received will be invited to participate in
a workshop at the exhibition closing. In so doing, Slought
Foundation offers the organization itself as a forum for dialogue
in the spirit of the featured project.
This program is made possible in part through the generous
support of the Consulate General of Israel in Philadelphia,
Cultural Affairs; American Associates, Ben-Gurion University
of the Negev; and the Society of Friends of the Slought Foundation.
Organized by Osvaldo Romberg
About the Foundation
Slought Foundation ('Sl-aw-t') is a non-profit organization
in Philadelphia that broadly encourages new futures for contemporary
life through public programs featuring international artists
and theorists. The foundation's programs are purposely critical
and provocative in an intimate and participatory environment.
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