Visual Syntax of Race

A Natural-Worker Leaves the Colonial Visual Archive: The Art of Vered Nissim

“…Nevertheless, scholars demonstrated how the construction of the Mizrahi identity is rooted in the colonial history, and its settler\native discourse (Cohen and Evri 2017;Jacobson and Naor 2016). In visual culture Mizrahi scholarship, the oppressive aspects of the archive were explored by Hazan (2018), who analyzed the role of the Hadassah women's organization in visualizing and spreading the Zionist prospect to international audiences. In practice, Mizrahi feminist artist Dafna Shalom's project Identity and Identification (2012) was a social art project of creating Mizrahi bottom-up and inside-out historical narratives through the creation of a community archive as an alternative to the historical erasure that was part of Israel's melting pot policies (The Israeli Center of Digital Art 2015).…”

“…According to Chinski, and the scholarly work that followed her, the logic of Bezale's division of labor, assigning Mizrahis to the workshops of folkloric art, and Ashkenazis to the prestigious studios of fine art, underlies the Israeli art field till now, which is characterized by a gender and racial imbalance amongst artists, curators, collectors, and audiences alike (Chinski 1997). Hazan (2022) A woman wearing a light fabric dress stands on a sidewalk at an urban intersection (Figure 1). A headkerchief covers her hair loosely, and her face is seen from the profile.…”

“…by a gender and racial imbalance amongst artists, curators, collectors, and audiences alike (Chinski 1997). Hazan (2022) studied the display practices applied in Israeli national museum exhibitions since 1948 and revealed the colonial context and naturalization mechanisms of the institutionalized racialization of Mizrhais. My own study on gender and race in pre-1948 Zionist visual culture demonstrated how the Zionist establishment's implantation of various colonial practices constructed a Zionist scopic regime, within which a racialized image of Mizrahi women symbolically marked the entire Mizrahi group as Zionism's intranational racially based Others (Rajuan Shtang 2023).…”

“…The appearance of the women in Rosner's photograph connotes what I have conceptualized as the double role of Mizrahi women in pre-1948 Zionist visual culture: as spectacles of "Imperialistic Nostalgia" or "Human Labor" (Rajuan Shtang 2023). Applying a critical race studies and visual culture analysis of the photograph's "visual syntax of race" (Hazan 2022), demonstrates how, using the racial marker of "perpetual past", the photograph reproduces the categorization of Mizrahi women as natural workers. Semiotically, the women's visual appearance is associated by Western viewers with a static, primitive, and indigenous past.…”

“…At the same time, photography was used as an effective and powerful tool for inventing, constructing, and establishing social constructions of the Jewish race as an existing fact with material reality. Hazan demonstrated how the visual syntax of race, which was used in Zionist photography since 1948, served the violent demand for rigid appearance patterns that blocked diverse identity definitions (Hazan 2022). The signifier of "eternal past" is one of the characteristics of a practice that Etien Balibar called "racialization without race", in which racialization relies on the field of culture (Balibar 1991).…”