Neighbors
Ahmad Canaan and Moshe Kassirer
2014
“Neighbor” is a word that implies proximity, but not necessarily contact. Neighbors are affected by one another’s presence, but they can choose whether or not to be involved in each other's lives, and if so, how.
Although Jews and Arabs coexist in Galilee, how they interact is the personal choice of every resident of the region.
One of the most significant fears of getting too close to someone else is compromising or losing one’s identity. The exhibition “Neighbors” is the result of cooperation between two Galilean artists, Ahmad Canaan from Tamra, and Moshe Kassirer from Yodfat. Both artists are of the same generation and they speak a similar artistic language, but Kassirer and Canaan each have distinct identities. Both are influenced by the past— by the tradition and culture in which they were raised — and this influence is clearly evident in their art.
The exhibition encourages reflection and dialogue, raises questions, and above all seeks to eliminate fear of proximity. It demonstrates that coexistence and seeking areas of overlap and parallel areas of interest enable each artist to maintain his identity, yet also benefit from the presence of the other.
Ahmad Canaan’s name connects him to the history of the land. He considers himself a Canaanite, a descendent of a people that inhabited this region in biblical times. One of the repeating images in Canaan’s work is that of Saladin, who united the Arab nation and fought off the Crusaders. Canaan’s use of the image of Saladin in his work demonstrates a yearning for the past, for a unified Muslim world compared to that of the present day, which is split and antagonistic. Ahmad is a Palestinian artist. His work contains images of refugees, as he relates to his family’s trauma in the War of Independence and the establishment of the State of Israel, when relatives fled to neighboring countries and their assets were appropriated by the State.
Moshe Kassirer establishes a dialogue with the image of the pioneer Israeli, speaking Hebrew and wearing a blue sun hat. Kassirer uses the blue hat, the kova tembel, as a symbol of the loss of lofty Israeli ideals and patriotism. Kassirer’s work has two main anchors, the majority rooted in the distant past and drawing inspiration from the stories of the bible, and the minority from present day life in Galilee. This fresh and original perspective forms the bridge between the two periods, and that is what makes Kassirer’s work contemporary. For example, there is a duality in his depiction of the olive tree. It is mentioned in the bible as one of the seven species of fruit with which the Land of Israel was blessed, and it is still conspicuous in the Galilean landscapes today. The ladder was designed for work and it also corresponds to the ladder in Jacob’s dream, a ladder imbued with spiritual elements. Once a year Moshe creates a painting of six anemones, each time in a different setting, as his way of keeping the memory of the Holocaust alive.
Canaan and Kassirer both paint the physical and human landscapes around them. They both have overt and covert criticism towards the society in which they live, and they both look longingly to the past, both because life was simpler then, and in a spirit of idealism.
Shoshi Norman, Curator, 2014
