Jonathan Omer Mizrahi and Bekriah Mawasi will meet for a conversation about satirical texts and images that continue to carry histories that remain unresolved.
For nearly three decades, a Coca-Cola billboard stood above the Falafel on HeAmal Street. Its red color had long since been eroded from its scarred façade, until it disappeared from the view of passersby and the building’s residents alike. For Jonathan Omer Mizrahi, the billboard is inseparable from news channels and commercial media, intertwined with the same economic interests and cross-ownership. Together, they produce a visual regime of capital, information, and desire. A sip of “the Taste of Life” (as per Coca-Cola’s Hebrew slogan) winds up the death drive, reproducing itself within an intense, sugar-coated media environment in which pleasure is dependent on concealing a reality of killing.
A hidden mural is revealed behind the billboard: a four-meter-long red mullet. The “Manshiyya Red Mullet”—Sultan Ibrahim Dhak min al-Manshiyya (سلطان إبراهيم ذاك من المنشية: That sultan Ibrahim from Manshiyya)—swims in the present, amidst infrastructures of erasure and memory. Apart from the sign, Mizrahi collects traces of the annihilation processes taking place on the studio’s threshold, from the orchard workers’ housing to the walls of Artport.
As reality is subsumed into a screen of images, propaganda, content, and advertising, Mizrahi traces the theological mechanisms of influence. He publishes satirical ads in the widely-read religious Zionist weekly Karov Elekha (Heb. very near you or “nigh unto thee”). Alongside opinion pieces proclaiming redemption through the destruction of Gaza, he places an advertisement of “Earplugs for insouciance,” resistant to “the cries of babies, screams of pain and guilt.” Echoing the Hebrew title of the landmark exhibition curated by Sarah Breitberg Semel, “The Want of Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art” (“But the word is very nigh unto thee”) as well as the title of the weekly itself—both derived from the biblical verse in Deuteronomy (30:14), which locates the divine sublime as well as moral action in close proximity—Mizrahi approaches that contiguity as a blind spot. The closer an object comes to the eye, the harder it becomes to see it; the nearest crime is concealed within the gaze itself. This cruel paradox turns proximity into an apparatus of estrangement: the closer things converge, brought together to the point of contact, the wider the abyss between them.
