Copper Wing | The Contemporary art center, Ramla | curated by DR. Smadar Sheffi | Director of the Ramle Museum Complex and the CACR: Ron Peled, exhibition producer: Maayan Liaty

 

June - October 2022

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Meydad Eliyahu’s solo exhibition engages in the presence and layers of the culture of the Indian Jewish community in Ramle and in Israel as a whole. In the installation comprising the personal and public, sensuous soft and hard materials meet and fuse.

Eliyahu expands and summarizes an extended conceptual process he began with exhibitions in Israel and in India. Over the past decade, he has been exploring repressed spaces within Israeli culture and among the Indian communities in Israel, seeking influences and unrecognized traditions, tracing forgotten or obliterated historical events and social phenomena. Copper Wing proposes a new place for these traditions.

The exhibition is parallel to the Art Workshops Project in public spaces, community centers, and schools, which Eliyahu is facilitating in Ramle. 

Exhibiting Copper Wing in the city of Ramle is inseparable from the fundamental nature of the Project: it floods issues of community belonging and local identity, multiculturalism, and personal and collective processing of connection to place, all vital issues in an immigration society. Copper Wing illuminates the gap between the absent – and often one-dimensional – perception of Indian culture in Israel and the contemporary and historical cultural richness which Indian immigrants brought with them to Israel, but which were marginalized by Israeli culture.

Copper Wing is dedicated to the memory of the artist’s father, Avraham Eliyahu of Blessed Memory, a public figure who passed away recently during preparations for the exhibition.

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 Dr. Smadar Sheffi