Black Bricks | Exhibition in the 24th Nidbach Series

In the exhibition “Black Bricks,” Roza Igzaw delves into the physical, emotional, and cultural structures that surrounded her as a child, deconstructing them into fragments of memory and architectural shards. She scrutinizes the architecture of her childhood, the neighborhood from which she fled, striving to understand the ways in which she herself and the Ethiopian Jewish community—Beta Israel—took shape.

Rooted in Ashdod’s Quarter C (Kiryat Pittsburgh), the project reflects a space populated by vastly different communities, primarily the ultra-Orthodox (the Gur Hasidic sect and Rabbi Leibowitz followers) and the Ethiopian community, that settled there in the late 1990s. Igzaw, who immigrated to Israel at the age of two, arrived in the neighborhood with her family in 1999 directly from the absorption center.

The exhibition combines paintings and a sculptural installation consisting of clay cubes of varying dimensions, stacked one atop the other and arranged side by side. Igzaw employs a traditional Ethiopian building mixture—a blend of clay soil collected near Hazeva where she resides, straw from a local cowshed, and sand. The bases of the sculptures are made of recycled household materials. The paintings, created using pigment derived from the same traditional mixture, portray scenes drawn from childhood memories and dreams. Igzaw renders the same image over and over again, hoping that each iteration will give her clearer insight. The ink hues, altering from one painting to another, are influenced by the minerals she adds to the pigment.

Igzaw seeks to conjure up the private stories lost in the block, a place whose structure ostensibly dictates a consistent, uniform historical narrative. Through her work, she aims to rewrite a fragmented private and communal history, without obscuring the violence or mending the rift. It is a visual journey, originating in personal biography, branching out to illuminate cultural and social issues touching on gender, ethnicity, and multiculturalism. The works invite contemplation of the resilience and flexibility of the structures that populate both individual and collective consciousness.

Michal Baror