Iran, My Love, Einat Sinai Pasternak

nonaorbach
6 days ago
2 min read

I was born in Israel in 1974, nine months after the Yom Kippur War. I was five years old when my family moved to a new town. My first memory from there was getting out of the truck that was transporting our belongings and meeting a woman who asked me who we were. I told her enthusiastically that we had come to live here and that we were relatives of my aunt, who already lived there.

Her response was: "Oh, another family of Farsi miduna..."*

It was my first encounter with the ethnic demon that soaked into my consciousness as an experience of persistent suppression, a source of inferiority, anxiety, and a sense of unrelenting shame that I had carried within me for many years.

It was only when I became a mother myself that I decided to confront this biographical fact, which was a source of mental anguish due to ongoing repression, a source of feelings of inferiority, anxiety, and unrelenting frustration.

I have been fortunate enough to develop the ability to express myself artistically over the years.

In my fifth decade of life, I joined my master's degree studies at Oranim, focusing on creativity-based research, which became a significant turning point in my life.

The study's starting point was late root work. In my forties, I found myself flooded with memories of my parents from Iran, their homeland, hearing countless stories from my extended family about the beautiful country from which they emigrated following the Zionist dream. I started digging through photo albums, picking up objects that came "from there," and everything turned into sensual raw material that activates the springs of creativity in me.

Since then, I have been developing a body of work whose essence is the influence of Iranian culture on my life through a meticulous examination of the encounter between the two worlds. As time passed, I became captivated by everything related to Iran, which led to a process of fusion and refinement of aspects of my identity.

In my work, I have created a collection of representational images of the imagined Iran that I am a part of. By experimenting with various artistic media that create a new, multidisciplinary language, I create an alternative biography in which I pour my identity, freeing it from the inhibitions of the past.

All of this was before October 7, before the head-on confrontation with Iran, a shocking situation that signaled to me in my heart that an attack was about to take place.

These days, when disaster is present among us, the conflict and the crisis resonate in the reality of all of us; my art takes on a special power. The baby, who was born nine months after another collective catastrophe, has grown to be an adult with a heavy shadow hovering over her all the time – I want to illuminate the dark places that perpetuate the struggle between the two countries and believe that art is a space that allows for a different discourse based on a desire for life and a desire for personal and collective redemption.

*A derogatory term for Iranian immigrants in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s