WATCHING THE SKY FALL and FORESTING OVER THE NAKBA. Work by Dale Washkansky. At the AVA Gallery, Cape Town.
MEGAN CHORITZ writes
I am a bit of a mess. I have just come back from the AVA Gallery in Church Street, where I met up with Dale Washkansky, the artist exhibiting two profound pieces, Foresting Over the Nakba, and Watching the Sky Fall.
Foresting Over the Nakba is a tryptic that is a response to the JNF (Jewish National Fund) foresting over the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lavi, with trees planted with South African Zionist money. The forestation of land in Israel has been part of the bold expansionist project, one that denies the villages, lives and even very existence of the Palestinians whose history has been purposefully erased.
The tryptic manages to capture this story in a devastatingly emotional way. The colours remind me of both the forest and the little blue JNF coin boxes we all grew up with. They were part of the fabric of Jewish life in South Africa, inextricably linked to Zionism.
Emotional and political expression
His other work, Watching the Sky Fall, made up of squares of individual images, is almost too much to bear. These small squares make up a greater image of erasure. Old maps of Palestine, pre Zionist occupation, layered with images of the current Genocide. Dale tells me that on Google maps, Gaza is not there. There are black holes in the sky of Gaza. The prison walls are censored out.
Gaza is not a real place on Google maps. If Google maps can’t show the actual place, then where are the people who inhabit it? I kept thinking of one of the massive bombs that exploded in Gaza earlier this week, with human bodies visible above the plume of smoke.
These two works are both an emotional and political expression of what we can and can’t see. What remains hidden, and what is erased. What is done and denied. And Dale has managed to create work that is contained yet screams.
What: Work by Dale Washkansky
Where and when: AVA Gallery, Church Street, Cape Town, until 16 April 2025
WS
