Just days after October 7, Meydad Eliyahu (born 1983) began drawing the faces of the hostages in his sketchbook, posting a photograph of a new work on social media nearly every day. 251 portraits of the civilians, soldiers, and foreign nationals abducted to the Gaza Strip during the Simchat Torah massacre filled six of his sketchbooks. The faces of the hostages – familiar in every home in Israel, displayed on posters at demonstrations around the world and, conversely, torn from campus walls – appear in his drawings as more human than ever. They are on show in the exhibition “My Life at the Moment” at Beit Avi Chai.
Two more collections by Eliyahu are featured in the show: one is a series of drawings of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, created during his reserve duty, documenting the people and landscapes of the grieving, devastated kibbutz as it tried to maintain some semblance of routine amid chaos and tragedy. And a third, created around the time of the ceasefire, which presents scenes that echo the imagery of war in a distinct, more optimistic palette. All three series translate images from the language of news into Eliyahu’s unique artistic language.
The war broke into your life on October 7. Did it break into your studio too?
“Before October 7 I was making a determined effort to return to a studio routine after a long period of curatorial and production work. That routine was completely disrupted. I found myself at home, quickly called up for reserve duty, needing to deal with immediate, external demands in the face of danger. I drew portraits of hostages out of the need to keep art part of life – part of the situation – through direct engagement with what was happening.”
Did the war disrupt your work or accelerate it?
“It focused me on what was essential. A series of prints – more oblique in their reference to the situation – developed out of my work with stencils, which had begun before the war. I used stencils of symbols, shapes, and objects to speak about identity and about the intense, almost impossible existence here. The work continued at the print workshop in Jerusalem and later during a residency in Venice, eventually becoming the heart of a solo exhibition, Pendulum, curated by Tal Schwartz at the Shefter Gallery in Kraków, Poland. I would work at home, at night, at every available moment. There was healing in it – a way of processing a very difficult reality.”
Some critics argue that art responding to a traumatic event needs time – that you have to wait, process, step back. Do you agree?
“What the past two years have taught me is that our reality surpasses all imagination, in the deepest and most difficult sense. Creative processes have their own rhythm, and that rhythm is elusive and unpredictable. Sometimes I find myself responding immediately and effectively; other times it takes months. It is hard to find the pulse in relation to reality – but in the continuity of creation, in the through-line, there is great comfort.”
Is the Israeli art world heading into a dark, depressing post-war period?
“Art is elusive, and what is dark to one person can be moving and healing to another. I find that lately artists are retreating inward, disengaging from reality. But I don’t think art needs to be in direct dialogue with reality so much as it needs to carry awareness and a stance toward it. Even withdrawal is a stance. This is an important time for artists to be especially conscious – and also to show their work outside the familiar frameworks of culture and art.”
What is art for? Who are you making it for?
“Art has its own space – a space of free, independent expression – and that is something we must protect. It doesn’t need to mobilize for a cause, or to decorate, or to serve anyone, and that is of course a very fragile place from which to operate. I see art and creation as part of life, and an essential part of being a human being, a cultural being.”
Visit the exhibition “My Life at the Moment”>>
This article was originally published in Hebrew.
Main Photo: Meydad Eliyahu \ 27x19 cm. Gouache and watercolor on paper