By Joy Hakanson Colby / The Detroit News
DETROIT--After her husband Yair, 31,
was killed in a terrorist attack, a grieving Mariam Mendelsohn was worried
about her Arab friends and neighbors. Don't come to his funeral, she
warned, fearing for their safety if they mourned with a Jewish family in
the West Bank community of Dolev.
Her Arab friends stayed away and
violence was averted.
Today, 11 years later, this wouldn't
happen.
"There was a time when Arabs and
Jews could live side by side in Israel," says Detroit artist Deanna Sperka,
"but relations between them have become very strained. There is a lack of
trust on both sides."
Sperka, who travels to Israel twice
a year to visit three of her sons and work on art projects, interviewed
Mendelsohn and several families of victims and survivors in 1994-95 after
terrorist attacks followed the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestine Liberation Organization.
"I wanted to make these people real
to the world rather than nameless, faceless statistics," she says.
The artist previously used the
material in an art installation she exhibited in Flint and the Metro
Detroit area. Recently, she condensed the 30 hours of interviews into a
30-minute video titled Terrorism -- A Work in Progress. Its first public
showings are being held at the Museum of New Art (MONA), where the first
annual Detroit Video Fest is going on through Feb. 24.
Sperka's work is among 85 videos
sent by artists from around the world. Together they represent 24 hours of
viewing time, says Jef Bourgeau, MONA's director.
He looped the videos together in 12
2-hour tapes, which run nonstop on 10 monitors during museum hours.
Viewers, who don't want to sit through a whole tape, can pull something
out of the video library and see it in a side room.
Videos range from one minute in
length to one hour. The director has attempted to group them by themes
such as comedy, narrative or gender issues. Sperka's Terrorism is on the
documentary tape along with videos on the Holocaust, censorship and
relationships between fathers and sons.
"There isn't much comedy in our
festival," Bourgeau says. "We didn't get any dancing beer cans."
Even in international company,
Sperka's video stands out. Fellow exhibitors are from Italy, Germany,
France, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, Russia, Sweden, Argentina, Greece
and Denmark.
"Deanna made a great video,"
Bourgeau says. "But it's hard to talk about because it's only a piece of
the puzzle. I wish we had been able to represent the Arab perspective to
balance it."
For her part, Sperka says she tried
to get interviews with Arab families of victims.
"I went to Bassem Eid, who was the
Arab field coordinator for the Israel Information Center for Human
Rights," she says. "He was too busy at the time to line up people because
he was working with a British television crew on another project. I knew
if I went back to the United States without an equal voice, my work would
not be clearly understood."
If she couldn't reach Arab families,
Sperka decided to do the next best thing. She interviewed Eid along with
Yuval Ginbar, his Jewish counterpart in the organization working for human
rights. The Jew was optimistic about future peace between the two peoples.
The Arab, on the other hand, flatly maintained peace never would be
possible.
Sperka has been back to Israel
nearly a dozen times since she did her interviews for Terrorism. "Most of
the things people were saying then have come to fruition," she says.
Does she fear for the safety of her
family in Israel? "I try to take fear out of my life entirely," she says.
"Fear is destructive."
An Orthodox Jew, Sperka describes
herself as being surrounded by rabbis. Her husband, Shlomo, is an ordained
rabbi. So are the couple's four sons and one son-in-law.
Three of the Sperka sons and their
families live in Israel. Why? "Because there's an intensity there, a
connection with the land and with their own people," their mother says.
Since Terrorism -- A Work in
Progress evolved from an installation to a video, it is natural to wonder
if Sperka will take the subject to another level.
"No," she says. "I'm thinking about
doing a project on the destruction of sacred sites like the Buddha statues
demolished by the Taliban in Afghanistan. As an artist, I care very much
about annihilation of cultural artifacts." Sperka, who started out as a
painter in her native New York, says she will continue to work in the
medium of video now that Terrorism, her first attempt, is behind her. "I
learned a great deal by being my own photographer, my own lighting person,
my own director. The next one will be easier."
Bourgeau shares her interest in
video. Before he became a museum director he was a video artist, and he
says the current exhibit renewed his faith in the medium as an art form.
"I wasn't sure where video was
heading," he admits. "Where was the energy? Where was its uniqueness? The
field seemed dull to me until the entries came pouring in from all over
the world for the Detroit VideoFest."
While many of the entries are rough,
the ideas behind them are compelling and exciting Bourgeau says.
"The show makes me want to be a
video artist again."
That, he points out, is the test of
a successful exhibition.
Wednesday, January 30, 2002
The Detroit News.