The paintings and drawings featured in Pravda, Zoya Cherkassky's first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum, deal with the experience of Aliyah from Russia in the 1990’s, exploring stereotypes, fake news, and questions of Jewish identity
The journey of artists from the perimeter to the center of the consensus is an interesting topic, especially when considering artists like Zoya Cherkassky – someone who placed a question mark on the permitted and the forbidden within art, who has now opened her first solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, offering her own unique viewpoint on Israeli society.
Cherkassy, 41, was born in Kiev (what was then the Soviet Union, and today the Ukraine). Zoya made Aliyah to Israel with her family in the early '90s and is now part of the New Barbizon, an artists’ group dealing with realistic painting. Her first solo exhibition, which opened on January 10, includes paintings and drawings created in recent years that deal with her immigration. “The exhibition is a project that went on for seven years,” she says. “It's the first time that the subject of Aliyah from the Soviet Union has been given so much attention in Israeli art. It began as a project about stereotypes on both sides, but whilst I was working on it, it expanded in different directions.”
The exhibition's title, Pravda (“truth” in English, “emet" in Hebrew) refers to the Soviet Communist Party's paper, which disseminated fake news long before the notion became fashionable in the West. The works examine the stereotypes through Cherkassy's personal prism, a perspective shared by many immigrants from the former Soviet Union during that same period. About one million of them made Aliyah in the decade prior to the turn of the 21st century, mostly due to economic difficulties after the fall of Soviet Communism. The new immigrants had to deal with the question of Jewish identity while facing the religious establishment, and with the Israeli-Zionist ethos. Their adjustment to Israeli life was complicated more than once by humiliation and arrogance.
Works in the exhibition touch on the stumbling blocks in the process of immigration to Israel, in Cherkassy's realistic, sometimes humorous style, all the while expressing sharp criticism of the state, the establishment and veteran Israelis. The connection between realism, nostalgia, sharp-edged humor, and easily identifiable situations turn the exhibition into a mirror, into food for thought on the way that we, the citizens of Israel, deal with new immigrants and absorb them.
© Alie Posner
Until October 31, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (imj.org.il)