Imagine, if you will, a bevy of haredi young men, kitted out in their finest all-black traditional threads, strutting up and down a fashion show catwalk. That’s not exactly the way sees it but he does open our eyes to some surprising aesthetic elements of the ultra-Orthodox community we might otherwise have missed. Twenty-nine year old Jerusalemite Khalifa is one of 42 up-and-coming artists exhibiting their work in the Artists’ Greenhouse category of this year’s Freshpaint art and design fair, currently up and running at the Municipal Sport Center in Hadar Yosef, in north Tel Aviv (through to July 8).
Freshpaint, which has been running now for over a decade, was established in order to provide mutually beneficial encounters between the general public – who, naturally, may actually acquire some artworks in the process – and Israeli artists. Khalifa has something to show us – the secular and/or non-haredi majority – and clearly has his own ideas about how to do that in an innovative and alluring manner. One might even add the epithets “daring,” if not “downright provocative,” to describe his presentation.
All told, Khalifa has over 30 attractive eye-opening items on display in Hadar Yosef, with oil paintings and ceramics. They also include photographs of young haredim enjoying some downtime from their regular yeshiva studies. One shows a black kapota-clad youngster lying next to a swimming pool lazily extending a tender hand towards the surface of the wate.
