Border Notes | Coexistence

Eyal Assulin and Joseph Dadoune are both artists from the Gaza Envelope, born and living in the town of Ofakim. They chose to exhibit their work at the neighboring Be'eri Gallery, not being able to ignore this past summer and exhibit anything else. Those of us who live in the Gaza Envelope and experienced firsthand the past "operations", particularly operation "Protective Edge", are struggling to return to our daily routine. The Be'eri Gallery is the natural place to broach this subject, and has an audience that can accept and understand it. Here we all speak the native "Gaza Envelope" language.

Eyal Assulin is exhibiting a painting mounted on a massive wooden frame, a work somewhere between handmade and a digital print. He paints a toy looking Iron Dome, that holds headless rockets or some kind of pastel colored pipes. The painting portrays an ongoing action of launching/ pouring/ vomiting a bright pink liquid, sensually oozing out of the painting into the open, onto the floor. The work deals with the inability to contain the security situation and the violence it produces.

On the floor of the gallery stands an installation made out of red colored tiles. The tiles are composed of the blurred image of an Iron dome, digitally printed on paper. The images appear to be worn out by the movement of walking over it. The endless moments of running for shelter. When the viewers look at the installation they stand right in its range of fire- the sky above the air defense system.

While Eyal Assulyn is busy designing his Iron Dome ("Pastel Dome"), a work that asks apparently innocent questions about the war and death occuring all around him, Yosef Joseph Dadoune sits at home during the days of Operation Cast Lead and creates a diary of the daily events during the war. Dadoune www.gallerybeeri.co.il draws daily, one drawing for each day of the war, using the blue of the Israeli flag and the Green of the Hammas flag. The Israeli blue and the Hammas green are fresh and vibrant colors. Black stripes of industrial duct tape symbolize a day of fighting, grey duct tape for a day of cease-fire. The stripes divide, restrict and frame the drawings within the sheet of paper, place borders within the fresh and erupting energies of both sides.

This war journal exists beyond the reach of the two sides that deny the existence of the other. Joseph Dadoune uses office utensils, pastel pencils for classic drawing and markers from the world of graffiti and comics. The colors are intense and chilling, and seem to be taken from some chemical plant in a science fiction movie.