Rafram Chaddad | Temporary Relocation | The Bronner Residency

Curator: Tal Bechler
May 30, 2015 - Aug 15, 2015

Rafram Chaddad is a nomadic artist who travels between Israel, Tunisia, and Europe. His varied artistic output includes sculpture, photography, writing, and community engagement. Chaddad uses perishable materials and engages with sustainability and local traditions to connect people, explore his own roots, and preserve his family heritage. During his artist residency in Düsseldorf, he made an ink drawing based on the ex libris of his family’s old printing house on Djerba Island in Tunisia. From this drawing he produced a stamp, with which he stamped images in ink mixed with orange juice, as his grandfather used to do in his printing house. Therefore, the printed images on view in “Orange Trails” smell of citrus. In Düsseldorf, the artist’s housewarming consisted of scattering orange peels that he brought from his home in Tunisia, documenting them at various stages of drying and uploading the images to a photo-sharing application. Dry orange peels are also hung in the exhibition space, recalling a Tunisian kitchen. In the local context, the work is also charged with the associations attached to the orange as an Israeli icon. During the opening event of the exhibition, the visitors, partaking of black coffee spiced with orange peel and coriander seeds, function as another “object” on display behind glass walls. The totality of colors, aromas and tastes presents artistic creation as rooted in local tradition, craft, and personal biography.

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