PerSlovak 2.0

Yoav Horesh
November 2, 2023 – January 5, 2024
Maine Jewish Museum

“I was born in Jerusalem to a Persian-born mother and a father of Slovak origin. My mother was the only one in her family who married outside of the Persian-Jewish community and my father was the only one in his family who married a non-Ashkenazi Jew. From 2008 to 2015 I have photographed 55 family members (parents, siblings, uncles, aunts and their children), directing the large format camera to the physical elements which make up the face. In most cases I found myself in my relatives’ faces: The PerSlovak.”

Are there any facial features that are Jewish / Israeli? An Ashkenazi mouth? A Sephardic nose? Or maybe mixed eyes? By disassembling and reassembling these ethnic homogeneous family portraits, one can create more than nine million possible faces that do not exist but could have been an Israeli hybrid. The work debates historical, cultural and ethnic components inherent in the term “Melting Pot,” —a term that was conceived to create a shared Israeli identity for the tens of thousands of Jews who came to Israel after World War II from around the world. This ingathering of the exiles happened in my immediate family—but did not happen until the third generation in my extended family.

Perslovak 2.0 will be an interactive exhibition at the Maine Jewish Museum. Visitors will have the opportunity to create their own version, out of 9 million possibilities, what it looks like to be Jewish. Through the use of a computer data base of black and white photographic portrait options, visitors will pick and choose facial components and print out the results. The resulting portraits may then be added to the walls of the exhibition to further the exploration of what it looks like to be Jewish in our current time.