Dor Guez, Georgiopolis
Curator: Drorit Gur Arie
05/11/2009 -
27/02/2010
“Georgiopolis,” Dor Guez’s one-person exhibition, proposes, for the first time, scrutiny of the Christian-Arab minority in Israel, a reference group which has not heretofore been granted profound perusal as a differentiated ethnic group in the local cultural field. “Georgiopolis” (City of St. George, the Christian name of the city of Lod in the 12th century) unfolds the story of a single Christian-Arab family extending over three generations, sketching cultural, religious, ethnic, and historical junctions. The title of the exhibition is intended to remind viewers of the intricate place of the Christian-Arab-Israeli-Palestinian community in-between the two majority groups in Israel: the Jews, for whom the city is Lod; and the Palestinians for whom it is Lydd. Georgiopolis, which has grown nearly invisible, re-surfaces in-between, acquiring a pivotal presence as yet another figure in Guez’s works. The exhibition introduces the voice of the Christian Arabs as an ethnic minority in Israel and a religious-ethnic minority among the Muslim Arabs, challenging the validity of prevalent conventions in the local public discourse as they encounter the private, the personal, and the human.
Spanning photography, video, and sound works, the exhibition is centered on three generations in the Lod-based Monayer family, whose story is entwined with the history of the city, which was occupied in 1948 by the Hagana and the majority of its citizens were expelled. The chronicles of the family, which stayed in the city and rehabilitated itself there, are outlined through the personal experiences of the grandfather, Jacob, his four sons—Salim, Samih, Sami, and Silver, and the young granddaughters—Samira and Jenifer, creating a moving, personal, inter-generational mosaic of identities of an intricate multi-lingual and multi-cultural existence.
Guez’s project transpires in the realm of praxis and discourse in-between history, anthropology, and art, while employing a cinematic practice underlain by a testimonial-documentary dimension. Guez, who is absent-present in his works, uses documentary raw materials presenting the collection of evidence brought before him. His work reports, from the very first sight, its being evasive, possibly deceptive, devoid of a master narrative, and in any event—one which refuses an unequivocal definition of its identity, much like his interviewees who present to us complex world views, replete with conflicts and nuances.
The exhibition challenged the prevalent order of identities in Israel, and the attempt to label identities under narrow, limited categories such as “Israeli,” “Christian-Arab,” “Palestinian,” etc. It offers a new perspective on the dilemma of identity and the definition of the different identities in the Israeli sphere.
While addressing highly charged, partly political, historical issues, Guez presents viewers with these questions through human stories, in a poetical, stratified manner which exposes multiple layers, personal perspectives, and diverse experiences of his protagonists. The power of Guez’s work lies in its ability to confront any viewer—regardless of ethnic and/or cultural origin—with their own position concerning notions such as “nationality,” “identity,” “ethnicity.”
The video work (Sa)Mira features a young woman whose entire appearance contradicts the Jewish-Israeli codification, the stereotype (in terms of physiognomy, skin tone, accent) of how an Arab woman is supposed to look. It brings the testimony of a student of psychology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, introducing one powerful traumatic moment. During the interview with Guez, Samira recounts an anecdote about the exposure of her Arab identity in the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. The customers were pleased with the service she gave them until the moment they noticed her name on the check. Despite her ability to “pass” without being labeled an Arab, Samira is identified as such by her name, which pushes her to a marked position in the ethnic hierarchy of identities in Israel. In order to keep her job, she is asked to Hebraize her name from Samira to Mira.
The work presents the four brothers of the Christian Monayer family born after 1948. A small minority, a minority within a minority, the speakers attest to themselves in this installation, arguing about the exact definition of their identity: Arab? Christian? Israeli? Palestinian? A combination of two or three of these designations? One declares that he feels a belonging to the Jewish people as well; another says that he is an Arab and nothing else. All consider themselves legitimate Israelis. Authenticity, for them, can only mean multifacetedness, self-irony (which emanates from all the speakers in the exhibition, especially those belonging to the family’s second generation), pluralism, and tolerance stemming from a position of a “minority within a minority” or, as one of the speakers puts it—the position of those who know that “we are the weakest conceivable people in the region.”
The video work Dear Jennifer is presented in Guez’s exhibition as part of the project “Conversion” initiated by the New Israeli Foundation for Cinema & TV. It features a young woman reading to the camera over and over again—in order to achieve perfect “performance”—a personal letter from her teacher in a reflexology course which she graduated with flying colors. The letter unfolds the teacher’s surprise at discovering her student’s Arab identity. The work demonstrates how the generation of meaning involves repeated patterns, and is often reflexive, thereby indicating the constant tension between reflection and appearance as capable of exposing social and aesthetic constructions.
Guez’s series of nocturnal photographs of Lydd Ruins taken in 2009 indicates that the remnants of the havoc wrought more than six decades ago are living materials, ongoing presences. Guez presents these traces for our gaze. In his photographs, Lydd’s ruins are illuminated by scarce available light, borrowed ready-made light partially originating in the streetlights, partially—in the adjacent housing blocks. By the light of night, the eye encounters ruins which appear more attractive than they are in broad daylight. The ruins are inscribed in the photographs as the relics of an abstract past; their contours as well as their urban setting are slightly blurred by wild vegetation.
