The Family: A Reconciliation

Slought is pleased to announce "The family," an exhibition about reconciliation, on display from March 20 - April 21, 2010. The family is a collaborative project undertaken by a Palestinian artist, Khader Oshah, and an Israeli artist, Haim Maor, Professor at Ben-Gurion University. They have spent three years painting members of each others' families. The project displayed at Slought features the artworks that resulted from this process. However, it is more than an exhibition of art, and privileges dialogue and cultural exchange as equally important gestures of reconciliation between two cultures who in this moment remain in perpetual conflict.

While it is generally discouraged today to reduce an artist to his or her cultural milieu, there are however signs of both cultures in these respective artists. And yet, though their styles may differ, through the exhibition these two attitudes become a single form. Maor, in his portraits on irregular, found pieces of wood, paints members of the family of Oshah, while Oshah's work uses an expressionist style to represent the family of Maor. Each portrait permits a reconstructed and renewed sense of self, albeit through the eyes of the other.

In so doing, despite decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Oshah and Maor perform an intimate and personal series of gestures that enable interaction on a human scale. Without presuming to mitigate the conflict that gave rise to the project, they nevertheless undertake a thought-experiment concerning the possibility of reconciliation.