Artwork: Addam Yekutieli, It Took Me till Now to Find You, mixed media, 2017
The Isreali/Palestinian conflict is one with such a long, fraught and complex history it’s hard to know where to begin to untangle it. Make sense of it. Have an informed position on it. That is unless it impacts on you personally. Then your very life situation becomes the pivotal point on which your perspective turns.
Isreali artist Addam Yekutieli—who also works under the pseudonym ‘Know Hope’ (@thisislimbo; www.thisislimbo.com)— has been creating work, both on the street and in exhibition spaces, that explores this terrain of a complex political and historical reality.
His new exhibition about to open at Gordon Gallery in Tel Aviv, It Took Me till Now to Find You, expands on these themes with the title coming from one of the artworks, an extract from a letter written by a Holocaust survivor to her childhood friend whose father served in the Gestapo.
Yekutieli says: “For this exhibition I collected letters written by Palestinians and Israelis, with the aim of hearing about notions of belonging, of homeland and longing. The authors of the letters come from eclectic backgrounds and various walks of life- left wing, right wing, settlers, military objectors, religious and secular. Each letter is addressed to whichever recipient the author chose fitting. At times, the letter is open ended, and other times it is addressed to someone very specific. The letters are all handwritten on paper in an intimate and personal tone.”
From the letters he took phrases and then scratched them into the surface of replicas of the Segregation Wall that stands between Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Phrases such as: “But I Also Feel”; “As If We Are”; “That Grey Area”; “I Was Proud”; “To Give In”; “Understand My Love”; “I Can Remember”; “Restored By Force”; “Your Home” and “We Only Meet So Far Away”.
As Yekutieli states: “By taking these texts out of their original context it is unclear whom the original author is, allowing it to gain a universal and ambiguous meaning and thus broaden the participation in the political discourse.”
Another significant element is the olive tree, the roots of which are present in each artwork. Besides the olive tree’s significance to both regions, it is the notion of offering an olive branch as a gesture of reconciliation or peace that comes to mind. How in offering these highly personal and disparate narratives from both sides of the the West Bank “wall” that separates Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories, Yekutieli’s underlying project is to not only reveal the intricacies of living with this conflict, but perhaps to also bring people closer to a more insightful understanding and desire for peace.
The emotional resonance of the artwork (evident in the original letters which are on display for the viewer to read), acts as the vehicle to further explore these complex political realities by acknowledging people’s connection through a shared humanity, finding commonalities through feelings around home, longing, love, jealousy, frustration, anger or hope. This allows the work to speak to diverse people, to create dialogue—and potentially empathy or understanding—over division.
To create a crack in the walls that we erect to separate; to reach a hand out in support, kindness, compassion and hope.