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Slought Foundation is pleased to announce The family: a project of reconciliation, on display from March 20 - April 21, 2010. 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 sponsorship or 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.
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