Identity is a biggie for many of us in this troubled cultural melting pot of ours. We all, seemingly, come from somewhere else. We all bring with us “extraneous” baggage to our new homeland – that is, except for some rare exceptions, such as a friend of mine who is an eighth-generation Jerusalemite.
Personally, after close to half a century in this country, I certainly feel a lot more Israeli than I ever felt British, but I’m never entirely one or t’other.
Haim Sokol has more identity issues than most. That informs his new exhibition currently on show at the Wild Gallery in the former President Hotel building on the fringes of Rehavia.
“You can divide Haim’s life into more or less equal segments,” says Soviet-born gallery founder and director Max Epstein. “He spent the first 17 years in the USSR, then 15 years here, and then around 15 back in Ukraine, and he returned here a couple of years ago.” The most recent transition, naturally, was prompted by the war in Ukraine.
I jokingly wondered whether that meant the returning resident would be moving on in around 13 or 14 years. Be that as it may, Sokol isn’t just an inveterate migrant. He is clearly invested in this part of the world. During his first stint here, he took a degree in Hebrew studies, thus immersing himself in the literary and linguistic backdrop of his adopted country, and the cheery chap I met at the gallery certainly had an impressive Hebrew vocabulary at his command, seasoned with just a smidgen or two of a Russian accent.
Sokol’s share of the showing, which takes in installations, graphics, and paintings, sits alongside animation works by Osi Wald. There is, apparently, a philosophical juncture between the two. “Osi and I worked in parallel, not together,” he explains. “The interface between us is the war within us and the war around us. I look at the war and also at myself within the war.”
Does that also relate to the battles the artist wages inside himself? “Absolutely. That prompts a lot of questions, about identity and identifying – what is my identity so I can identify with someone or something?”
The artist believes that, as a nation, we are desperate to form some kind of cogently formed image of ourselves, something we can cling to when the going gets tough. That, he says, can lead to negative fallout.
THERE ARE some pretty hard-hitting sentiments simmering just behind the veneer of Sokol’s works. “Who is the victim here?” he poses, citing sides of any altercation or political conflict. “Is there a definitive victim? The impression I get about Israeli society is that we are the victim, and everything we do is in response to what the other side is doing to us.”
That seesaw state of affairs crops up at various vantage points in Sokol’s exhibition, in all sorts of guises. The crow is one leitmotif. That immediately conjures up morbid thoughts of death, as per Van Gogh’s famed Wheatfield with Crows painting, often claimed to be the doomed Dutch painter’s final work.
“There is no clear-cut victim,” the artist adds. “I try to express that in my art, which includes poetry.”
Sokol proffers crows in a range of positions, surroundings, and disciplines. He is also evidently particularly adept at fashioning bona fide, convincing artifacts out of next to nothing. One bird sits on a shelf alongside a set of decorative glass and porcelain vessels that have been imbued with a new, very different lease of aesthetic and artistic life. As you draw up close to the feathered friend, you begin to discern the raw materials Sokol used to fashion the creature.
“That is just cheap floor cloth material,” he notes, indicating the wavy wing shapes. In Ukraine, you can buy that off a roll, for next to nothing.”
There is also a wire mesh in the seemingly flimsy yet sturdy-looking crow structure. The wiring reappears in one corner of the display space, with a pole attached conjuring up an unequivocal sense of a flag. Here, the artist leaves the viewers up to their own devices, to complete the picture, as it were. “You see, there is no color here,” he states. Presumably that means we can fill in the chromic design as we wish. “You can add any colors you want with your imagination, or just relate to it as a national symbol devoid or emptied of content,” Sokol adds. That’s certainly food for thought, and there was plenty more to come.
There is something fundamentally ethereal about wire mesh. There is the tangible metal grid-like component, but there is plenty of empty space in there, too. “The focus of my work is the substance,” Sokol enlightens me. “I thought about the substance that pertains to this age.” “Blood?” I venture, somewhat tongue in cheek. “Yes, blood, but that is an organic material. It is too blatant and direct. The material I feel represents the spirit of this age – that’s funny, ‘spirit’ and ‘material’ – is concrete, lots of concrete. And destruction – construction and destruction.”
That particular industrial raw material appears primarily in the set of pretty dishes. Sokol says there is a tactile corporeal progression involved here. “You start with cement. Cement is ground stone,” he says, pointing to a dainty glass container with a fetching lid full of the said substance. “I call that a monument to people drawn into things unwittingly.” The “things” in question are of a violent nature. That generally means armed cross-border conflict, a state of affairs with which Sokol is all too familiar, both in his native and adopted countries.
There may be an intentionally imposed fear factor in here, too. “We catch paranoia from different directions,” he suggests. “We get it from the TV, from everywhere.” After such a lengthy furlough from this country, Sokol says he was keenly aware of the change of political tack that evolved here during his absence. “When I got back to Israel, I switched on the television. It was Channel 14, Bibi’s channel. I listened to the language – I deal with words a lot. It was very heavy propaganda. I turned it off straightaway.”
Political leanings notwithstanding, Sokol leaps across other demarcation lines with merry abandon. He points to a tall handsome-looking cut-glass vase. It is full of hardened cement with spindly iron stems protruding from the top. He gives me the disciplinary bifurcating lowdown. “It cultivates this,” he observes, referencing opposite existential states. “You can call them objects that are semi-imagined, plucked from the memory of Soviet childhood or the way of life of Soviet olim in the 1990s. They brought with them genuine and fake crystal glass, and porcelain vessels. They are still used on festive meal tables in every family with Soviet roots.”
The repast imagery is also conveyed in the crockery-glass set. “That could be potato salad,” Epstein says, looking at the lumpy surface of the cement in one of the glass bowls. “All Russians eat that. The metal protuberances also look a little like flower stems, albeit well past their first flush of verdant youth, thereby giving a new and slightly darkly humorous slant on the idea of still life.
The crows also appear in a large tetraptych, with the birds set against a row of trees reminiscent of prison bars. Beyond that you can see large buildings in the distant background. “Crows live in cities,” Sokol says. “They live with us humans but are different from us.” It is a beguiling and thought-provoking scene.
THE IDENTITY core issue comes round again. “What is identity? Identity is the perception of the past which is engraved in our consciousness,” Sokol posits. “Our memory is inaccurate. We don’t remember. We learn our past. We form our identity based on the image of the past we have in our head.”
That is an intriguing take on our individual continuum, which appears to suggest an element of fakery, albeit unintentional. But does that really matter? Are we going to stray, here, into ever more dense philosophical thickets about objective, as opposed to subjective, reality?
That comes across in Wald’s work, in no uncertain terms. In one scene, there is a family – parents and child – getting on with their lives within their cloistered domestic cocoon. “But look here,” says Epstein, “here’s the reality of the outside world, but they are not taking any notice of it.” The plain cold facts of life, in the “real” world, are displayed on a TV screen showing IDF soldiers on patrol. The news caption reads: “[Military] action in the North of the country.” Perhaps if we don’t pay any attention to something, it simply doesn’t exist. Now that’s something to ponder.
Sokol’s spread also gets into intimate areas, with a red dress hung on a hangar which references his mother, and a small book stand with several tomes which belonged to Sokol’s late doctor father.
“I connect with my father through his books. These are really monuments.” Sokol’s deep interest in Hebrew words and etymology comes to the fore. “I don’t like the word ‘monument.’ That talks about ‘hantzaha’ [memorializing], which invokes ‘nitzahon’ [victory].” Then again there is a more simple meaning to the word. “‘Monument’ comes from the word in Latin [meaning] to mention someone or something. So this is a monument to my father and my mother, who is thankfully still alive.”
A look at the Wild Gallery
THE WILD Gallery is an inviting and impressive place. It houses the Wild Kids studio, which offers children and youth, aged five to 18, a place where they can express their thoughts and feelings in a creative and mutually beneficial manner. “Particularly at this time, with the war and the coronavirus years, when they were cooped up at home, and all the trauma they went through, this is so important,” says Epstein.
The array of hundreds of sketches, drawings, sculptures and animation works is, indeed, impressive.
“This is the younger kids’ area,” Epstein continues, “and this is where the older ones work.” There is no dividing wall in the open space section. “The kids and the older ones see each other’s work, and they inspire each other and exchange ideas. It’s wonderful to see them here. They need this outlet so much.”
Wild Kids seems to have done pretty well for itself, paucity of budget notwithstanding. “The kids have participated in all kinds of animation festivals, here and abroad, and they have won prizes,” says Epstein proudly, nodding toward the corner of a wall with a dozen or so framed certificates.
Wild Gallery has been around for about 15 years, moving house every so often, as premises were taken over by other bodies or demolished. It has been at the President Hotel site for a couple of years, with three years left to run on its contract.
Wild Kids, a far more recent venture, is just about treading water, and hoping to survive. “We started out with seven kids, and now we have over 100. Some have gone on to study at Bezalel and even abroad, and have come back here to teach.”
That sounds encouraging, but there is brass-tacks reality to be negotiated, too. “You have to manage on your own for the first couple of years, before you can apply for official funding,” Epstein says grimly. “It’s tough.”
That approach has always struck me as ludicrous and illogical. Surely, when a new project starts out, its need for financial support is greatest then, rather than when it has been up and running for a while. But who are we to question accepted institutional wisdom?
Let’s hope Epstein and his young stalwarts make it through and qualify for state support, and Wild Kids and the gallery can keep on providing us with compelling art and feel-good vibes.
For more information: www.facebook.com/WildGalleryJerusalem
