When we talk about relocation, we usually understand it to be a move of the residence of an employee or diplomat with his family to another country, for a fixed period due to changes or a promotion in the work place of the man. In these circumstances, the process is voluntary and with a willingness to advance the transition to the new country and try to integrate within the defined time period.
Sometimes relocation is not by free choice, as in the case of the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei who was forced into exile from his homeland to the West because of his activities against the Chinese regime or with respect to the artist Zoya Cherkassky who was forced to immigrate to Israel from the Ukraine as a 15-year-old girl with her parents. In these two cases, the artists were forced to leave their familiar lives and childhood behind and to adapt to a new life that was completely different not due to free choice.
When I visited the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, I discovered that these two artists, Ai Wei Wei and Zoya Cherkassky, presented their works side by side, by accident or on purpose, and I thought about the interesting parallel in their lives’ circumstances.
Ai Wei Wei works on subjects and materials he was familiar with in his native country. He replicates, for example, sunflower seeds or carpet squares, similar to the way Andy Warhol duplicated Coca-Cola cans, however, the duplications of the Chinese artist serve as a criticism against the communist regime which wants to mold its citizens’ behavior to that which suits Chinese leadership. Chinese people are expected to behave and think in a specific way, foregoing their human rights of free speech and creativity. Ai Wei Wei was arrested in China in 2011 without trial, and was held in harsh conditions because of his work and activities against the regime. Consequently he now lives in Berlin and presents his works in Western countries. The Chinese government arrested Ai Wei Wei for tax evasion and fined him £ 1.5 million. Thousands in China and around the world demonstrated against his political arrest, many helped him pay the first installment for his release. The payments became wallpaper of unofficial promissory notes created by Ai Wei Wei for each person that volunteered to pay his debt. The notes bear titles like ‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘fairness’, ‘freedom of speech’, and are glued to the walls of large halls in the exhibition.
Zoya Cherkassky immigrated to Israel from Russia in December 1991, an adolescent at a difficult age. She found herself at odds and in a completely different reality than she was familiar with. The first painting of the exhibition depicts new immigrants descending from an El Al plane in full winter clothes. The people are not happy and do not smile, they are in a state of in-between; no longer on the plane and not yet on the ground, the title for the picture is sarcastic: ‘new victims’. In the large oil paintings, we see the comparison between the snowy winter landscape of the Ukraine and the arid desert landscape of Israel.
There is a comparison between two anarchistic young girls dancing with hands and hair flailing to the sides and the ballet dancers viewed on the television screen. The cultural gap cannot be bridged, and Zoya presents it provocatively. For example, a pair of immigrants portrayed in the kitchen of their home on Friday eve are visited by a kashrut supervisor. The husband wears a skullcap, the woman in modest attire with a head covering, the Shabbat candles on the table with a Shabbat challah. On the face of it everything is normal, but to the surprise of the kashrut supervisor he takes from the refrigerator a pot containing a pig’s head.
The immigrants’ difficulty in integrating into Israeli culture and the Jewish experience is significant. In Russia, the Jewish child was humiliated by the gentiles, while in Israel the Russian child is humiliated by the Jews – we see it in two paintings that have the same composition and position of the characters, but the characters are dressed by Zoya in other clothes, Humiliation experienced by the child in Russia is now experienced in Israel. In both places there is violence and helplessness, as reflected in the photos “1991 in Ukraine” and “Friday in Housing 2015”.
All the subjects for Zoya’s paintings in an exhibition called “Pravda” are taken from the lifestyle of the Russian immigrants in Israel, the cleaning jobs in which the immigrants are employed mainly because of the lack of knowledge of the Hebrew language, working in Itzik’s falafel shop who manhandles the blond waitress, the anarchistic attire of the immigrants and their leisure culture, we can see the young people sitting on a park bench drinking beer, playing guitar or bodybuilding.
There is also nostalgia for Russian food, the motif of food cooked in a large pot and being dished out is repeated time and again, but while in Russia there is a line for bread – in Israel there are plenty of sausages and a large selection of cheeses on the supermarket shelves with Russian tags.
Zoya criticizes Israeli society in large formats. It is interesting to note that both the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei and Zoya Cherkassky choose to express themselves through very large installations or large formats, perhaps the physical size of the works reinforces their statements and validates them.