By Catie Byrne, Staff Writer

Published in print Feb. 25, 2015

On Feb. 19, the Weatherspoon Art Museum held Zones of Contention: At the Green line, a point of view discussion with George Scheer, founder of the thrift-store-turned-museum Elsewhere and Cora Fisher, the curator of SECCA in Winston-Salem, to explore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through art.

Scheer opened the discussion with his personal experiences celebrating non-traditional Passovers, explaining that it is about a reenactment of Jewish history. Fisher adds that to her, Passover opens up a conversation about the negotiation and trauma of the past, a past Scheer and Fisher discussed in relation to Yael Bartana’s “The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection,” which features young Israeli Jews and Arabs to re-stage Leni and Herbert Sonnenfield’s photojournalism of Israel from 1933-1948. Of the pictures, Scheer said, “They were Jewish and Arab settlers living off the land, it was an open, social exchange with agricultural possibility.”

“The Missing Negatives of the Sonnenfeld Collection” depicts different peoples typically in conflict while working together for a better future, a stark contrast from the adjacent “40 Days,” photographs by Dor Guez of unmarked defaced gravestones.

Scheer went on to describe that different people, depending on their perspective, will say that the graves represent the cruelty of Israel or Palestine taking innocent Palestinian or Israeli casualties of war.

However, Scheer clarified that the graves are Christian graves. He explained that the assumption of the peoples in the graves being Palestinian or Israeli demonstrates the need for this conversation, about the Zone of Contention between Israel and Palestine.

“You can’t have mutual recognition until a certain kind of violence ends, until one end puts their gun down. Green line [is about] two states, art challenges the presumed historical narrative,” said Scheer.

Fisher went on to describe the significance of this contention in the context of artistic expression. She emphasized that when looking at the displayed art, it is important to ask, “Does this grief provide a disruption of the historical timeline? What does it mean to look upon these photographs? How does this affect me? It comes down to personal view of loss or sadness.”

Scheer explained that Guez and Bartana’s pieces are in dialogue together, a dialogue of ideology about Israel as a religious and political state. He said that in the historical context of Bartana’s work, the portrayal is “a socialist reality.”

At the time, Scheer said, the secularists in Israel strived for equality and resented that Orthodox Jews didn’t have to work, pay taxes or fight in the military. Guez’s piece then reflects the consequences resulting from these underlying historical conflicts.

Fisher noted that in regards to the current conflict in Israel and Palestine, neither she nor Scheer cannot comment on the Palestinian perspective because they are both Jewish.

In a closing statement, Fisher said, “It [art] normalizes a situation of crisis, it can be seen as a good or bad thing. The artists are very careful, there’s a whole language to be calculated and specific. However you view this, this distance creates space people can come to.”