Dancing on walls: Yeshiva artwork promotes Israel’s recovery

Artists Danit Gordon and Treatwell Mnisi felt drawn to creating an artwork for Yeshiva College to commemorate 7 October, but each for personal reasons.

“Being so close but so far away to what happened on 7 October, I wanted to commemorate it but in a beautiful and hopeful way,” said Gordon, who is herself an alumnus of Yeshiva College, with children at the school.

Said Mnisi, “When the tragedy happened, I was touched. I felt pain for what had occurred to the young people in Israel, especially the families who lost their children, and those still being held hostage.

“I knew that I could contribute something tangible, something that can speak from the other side because being in South Africa and not being a Jewish artist myself means that I have to be involved in the community and try my best to show my support,” he said.

upstART Galleries owners Jaclyn Ellert and Gila Abramson commissioned Gordon and Mnisi to create a collaborative art piece, titled We Will Dance Again, that will be auctioned off in commemoration of 7 October and to show the country that Israel cannot be broken.

Ellert and Abramson got Kerri-Lee Epstein and Nikki Fichardt, the heads of the Yeshiva Primary School parent teachers’ association, on board. The idea was to display the artwork at the Yeshiva College campus and use it to raise funds for the school and Israeli charities.

The framed original artwork for this commission is being auctioned on WhatsApp, with bidding closing on 8 October. The reserve price is R18 000. A much larger iteration of the work will be painted on a central wall at the school that students and teachers will walk past every day.

Members of the community are also able to sponsor a block of the artwork, and while they won’t be able to take their block home, they will get to keep an individual print of the work.

upstART Galleries’ focus, said Ellert, is to “empower artists and give them a platform to promote their work. We wanted to put a South African artist together with a Jewish artist and see what they would come up with.

“Being passionate about art as well as Israel, and watching what has been going on, we wanted to do something in some way to commemorate 7 October and partner with an institution that would appreciate it,” Ellert said.

“The idea was to create an original piece inspired by 7 October and bring in both Dani and Treatwell’s backgrounds to raise funds for the school and hostage charities,” Ellert said.

Gordon and Mnisi’s artwork contains the Israeli and Jewish community drawn in charcoal dancing beneath the canopy at the Nova festival, with a large yellow ribbon flying over the top.

Said Gordon, “The canopy of the Nova festival represents am Yisrael [the nation of Israel]. So, you have soldiers, women, rabbis, and kids, and everyone is included because everyone was affected. Ultimately, we’re one nation. It promotes the concept that as a nation, we will dance again, and we aren’t broken.”

Gordon, who is a self-taught make-up artist, doesn’t primarily work with painting on canvas, but over the past few years, has turned her sights to painting watercolour and oil paintings.

“The piece is about hope,” she said. “It’s not about brokenness. It recognises the brokenness and damage done to our community, but it’s about looking forward and saying that we will dance again. Our community won’t be broken.”

Mnisi has two major solo shows under his belt and has previously worked with Ellert and Abramson. When asked to join the project, he jumped at the chance.

Said Gordon, “We spent a lot of time making many sketches and trying to put it all together. We cut out pieces of paper many times and just continued until eventually we got to a finished product, but it was a process of trying, persisting, and trusting our vision.”

Said Mnisi, “The beautiful thing is that we found common ground because I work with fluidic charcoal, and she works with watercolour, so it’s liquid. We had to work to make these two mediums come together.”

The piece was created in Gordon’s home which greatly improved the creative process, Mnisi said. “I’m happy that it took place in a home. A home filled with love, a place where there are children, a husband, and a wife. Because that’s exactly the kind of feeling, the integral substance, that we wanted to insert into the concept of the work.”

Said Ellert, “It’s nice to know that it started as just an idea and we didn’t know where we wanted to take it in terms of being too literal about 7 October. The focus wasn’t on devastation and destruction. It was on bringing hope and putting a positive spin on it.”

Said Epstein, “We thought this was going to be a commemoration – that the hostages would be home and the war is over. We had no idea that we were going to be celebrating an anniversary still at war, so everybody’s emotions have grown with this piece. At a soft launch of the project on 6 September, some [in the community] came and said, ‘All we can see is the yellow ribbon’. Others said, ‘All we can see is the community together’. There’s something in there for everybody, and every time you look at it, you see something different.”