Tigist Yoseph Ron: The White Paper is Black Within

Recipient of the 2019 Haim Shiff Prize for Figurative-Realist Art

Tigist Yoseph Ron’s expressive charcoal drawings depict portraits, events, and impressions from the Atlit Absorption Center, where she stayed with her family after immigrating to Israel in Operation Moses in 1984. Yoseph Ron engages with questions of identity and self-determination through an exploration of her relationship with her mother, who died when she was sixteen years old, and against the backdrop of the crisis of immigration from Ethiopia to Israel. Her engagement with the difficulties of integration into a new society and the price it entails also illuminates the stereotypes that inform the social attitude toward others.

At the center of the exhibition is a portrait of Yoseph Ron's mother, Yaelmwerk (in Amharic: Gold of the World). The mother, known as Nanya, passed away when Yoseph Ron was 16, an event that feeds and generates her registration action. The drawing serves as a kind of "anti-erasure", an object against oblivion, in an attempt to deplete, restore and condition lost memories in the process of erasing and re-writing. Yosef Ron documents and perpetuates in charcoal drawings figures, poses and personal memories related to her mother and family and the Ethiopian culture from which she came, just before they disappeared, for fear that an important part of her might disappear with them.

In the black drawings of the coal is always present. It produces from the charcoal a symphony of grays, and the light – the bleaching – it produces in erasure. Her pictorial expression is anchored in the tradition of realistic painting, combining traces of Cubism and expressiveness. She creates a hybrid between pictorial language formulated in the West, and personal content taken from the sights and memories of her homeland. Through them, the personal story and the story of the members of her community are woven, interwoven with an artistic discussion and broad issues such as racism, female traditions and the crisis of absorption in Israeli society.

The name of the exhibition, The White Paper is Black Within, originated in a series of works by Moshe Gershuni from the 1970s, in which he wrote various versions of the phrase "The Paper Looks White, but Inside, Within, It Is Black." This sentence illuminates a very personal aspect of Yoseph Ron's drawings, in addition to the protest, social and feminine aspects that emerge from them. Her works that examine the break in identity, are saturated with everything that is broken, disintegrated and broken, but also in the processes of fusion that accumulate into a complete and intense image.

Tigist Yoseph Ron, born in Gondar, Ethiopia in 1977 to a family of 12 brothers. In 1984, when she was 7 years old, she immigrated to Israel with her family. The journey of immigration from Ethiopia to Israel through Sudan, continued on a journey of absorption in Israeli society and continues to a large extent to this day. Yosef Ron, a graduate of the Department of Visual Communication at Bezalel, continued to study painting with the artists David Nifo and Zvi Lachman. Exhibited in group exhibitions in Israel and in 2018 in Addis Ababa.

Curator: Emanuela Calò

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2/9/20​-​3/4/21, Charles and Evelyn Kramer Galleries.

Photo by Elad Sarig