( de ) colonizer
research / art laboratory for social change
Devora Neumark has been a practicing interdisciplinary artist for more than twenty-five years. Her latest body of work Radical Beauty for Troubled Times includes the collaborative live art project (with Deborah Margo) entitled: Why Should We Cry? Lamentations in a Winter Garden and a series of dialogic performative events entitled The Jewish Home Beautiful – Revisited. Neumark’s most recent publications include: ‘Performing Aesthetics, Performing Politics: The Jewish Home Beautiful and the Re-shaping of the Jewish Exile Narrative’, Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture 1:1, (2010), pp. 37–51; ‘Performing Beauty, Practicing Home: Collaborative Live Art and the Transformation of Displacement’, in C. McLean and R. Kelly (eds.) Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice, Inquiries for Hope and Change, Calgary: Detselig/Temeron Press, (2010), pp. 419-436; ‘Close Proximity’, Performing Ethos 1:1, (2010), pp. 69-83; and Neumark, Devora and Chagnon, Johanne (Eds.) in collaboration with Lachapelle, Louise. Affirming Collaboration: Community and Humanist Activist Art in Québec and Elsewhere, Montréal and Calgary: Engrenage Noir / LEVIER, Detselig Enterprises Ltd. and LUX Éditeur, (2011).
Devora is a part-time faculty member in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Art program at Goddard College (Vermont).
Devora entered the Concordia University Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Cultural Humanities doctoral program in September 2008. Her PhD research (funded in part through a two-year SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship) addressed the role that art can play within the emerging interdisciplinary framework articulating the conditions for making home anew for dislocated individuals. At the nexus of this research/creation enquiry – wherein community art practice is both the subject and the working methodology – was a set of questions about home’s properties, associations, and manifestations (or lack-there-of) in the political, cultural, emotional, and embodied realms. Once displaced, what are the conditions necessary for making home anew? What role does beauty play in this complex process? And how do the stories we tell about home, influence our experiences of home? The analysis of this conjuncture between beauty and home is necessary in order to interrogate how the repetition of stylized narratives can construct on the one hand, strong intracultural alliances, and on the other, can contribute to the cycles of violence wherein the settling at home of one population sets into motion domicidal effects that impact another. In spring 2013, she was awarded her Ph.D. in Humanities.
Devora is currently developing plans to inaugurate a multiple year project aimed at creating a series of performative interventions to be located in or near the more than 1000 abandoned mining sites in Quebec and Ontario.
Created in Tel Aviv in December 2014,
Illegallery 81 is an art gallery which aims to host artists/performances dealing with issues of contested space, (il)legtimacy, (re)appropriation and the sharing of public space.
In March and April 2015,
Illegallery 81 will host Devora Neumark, an artist, researcher and performer from Montreal, Canada.
Click here to access Devora Neumark website
Watch the performance "Imwas / Canada Park" of Devora and click here to read the text she wrote and was published on Zochrot's website:
More to come soon!
Established in Tel Aviv in December 2014,
Illegallery 81 is an art gallery which aims to host artists/ performances dealing with issues of contested space, physical and symbolic boundaries, (il)legtimacy, (re)appropriation and (re)invention of shared public spaces.
De-Colonizer was invited to present an art-piece in the exhibition "Mention" organized thanks to the support of Amnesty International and curated by Salma Alsana.
We presented the documentation of a space intervention to mark the site where Abu Kabir stood until 1948.
Abu Kabir (today South Tel Aviv) is one of the only neighborhood that was completely destroyed by Israel right after the occupation in February 1948.
Our intervention took place in June 2016 amidst of development works by Tel Aviv municipality to turn the site into a bicycle trail, it means just a moment before the destroyed Palestinian locality will be turned into a park.
Two pieces were presented by De-Colonizer :
Piece 1 / Video work "Abu Kabir" (4'13 min)
Filming and editing: Eitan Bronstein Aparicio
Stills: Eléonore Merza Bronstein
Piece 2 / "Greetings from Abu Kabir - a series of postcards"
(In Arabic and Hebrew)
Stills and design: Eléonore Merza Bronstein
Previously at Illegallery 81
In March and April 2015,
Illegallery 81hosted Devora Neumark, an artist, researcher and performer from Montreal, Canada.
Together with De-Colonizer, she did a performance called "Next year in Mansura" in the Golan Heights.
Devora Neumark has been a practicing interdisciplinary artist for more than twenty-five years. Devora is a part-time faculty member in the MFA-Interdisciplinary Art program at Goddard College (Vermont).
At the nexus of this research/creation enquiry – wherein community art practice is both the subject and the working methodology – was a set of questions about home’s properties, associations, and manifestations (or lack-there-of) in the political, cultural, emotional, and embodied realms. Once displaced, what are the conditions necessary for making home anew? What role does beauty play in this complex process? And how do the stories we tell about home, influence our experiences of home? The analysis of this conjuncture between beauty and home is necessary in order to interrogate how the repetition of stylized narratives can construct on the one hand, strong intracultural alliances, and on the other, can contribute to the cycles of violence wherein the settling at home of one population sets into motion domicidal effects that impact another. In spring 2013, she was awarded her Ph.D. in Humanities.
For her collaboration with De-Colonizer, Devora Neumark performed "Mansura Revisited" (scroll down for the video).
The first part of the day was spent cleaning up a room in the school ruins, making it as beautiful as possible, ready to receive visitors; a metaphor for the welcome return of the refugees. Eléonore documented Devora’s labouring gestures, as did the Communications Officer of the Golan for the Development of the Arab Villages. Devora also documented her presence and the presence of others who accompanied her and at times contributed to the cleaning process. The second half of the day was devoted to the beautification of the room, as well as conversations with locals and family members and the processing of emotion stirred up by the experience of it all.
The video accompanying this text focuses mainly on Devora’s cleaning and beautification gestures. The process however is contextualized with visuals of the United Nations presence and military access warnings as well as the sounds of bombing heard from only a few kilometers away. Mansura Revisited was not performed in a vacuum: the ruins of Mansura cannot be abstracted from the contested physical and psychosocial geographies. As an artwork, beyond the living memories of the live art performance, Mansura Revisited continues to circulate as a video projection/installation. The video (which includes documentary material from both Eléonore and Devora and which was created by Devora in collaboration with videographer Jeroen Deraeve) critically and poetically engages the role that aesthetics can play in regional decolonization while pointing to the symbolic and physical legacies associated with expulsion and occupation.