{"id":635692,"date":"2026-10-04T01:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-04T01:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/635692\/"},"modified":"2026-10-04T01:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-04T01:42:12","slug":"artist-sarah-svetlanas-searching-luminous-homecoming-to-jaffa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/635692\/","title":{"rendered":"Artist Sarah Svetlana’s searching, luminous homecoming to Jaffa"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Mika Contemporary Art Gallery, the Los Angeles<\/a>-based artist\u2019s first solo exhibition in Israel turns memory, grief, and inherited displacement into a vivid abstract language.<\/p>\n

In the stone-vaulted rooms of Mika Contemporary Art Gallery in Jaffa, Sarah Svetlana\u2019s paintings arrive with the force of accumulated memory. Large, brightly colored fields are overlaid with bold, flower-like forms, polka dots, charcoal gestures, and traces of personal history.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, What Remains Awake, is Svetlana\u2019s first solo presentation in Israel and, for the artist born in Soviet Belarus<\/a> and raised in the United States, it is also a return charged with family history, mourning, and a newly urgent question of belonging.<\/p>\n

Born in 1985 to a Belarusian Jewish family, Svetlana left the Soviet Union as a child in 1989, shortly before its collapse. Her family, refugees at the time, had a choice between Israel and the US while passing through Rome; they ultimately settled in America.<\/p>\n

She now lives and works in the Los Angeles area. That unchosen route to Israel has remained a quiet but persistent presence in her work.<\/p>\n

\"AA view of a fountain in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, September 9, 2026. (credit: Rachel Alroey\/Flash90)<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work has always revolved around exile, assimilation, finding home,\u201d Svetlana said. \u201cIt\u2019s always been about trying to find home physically and within yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her first visit to Israel, undertaken alone, coincides with the exhibition and gives the project its emotional center.<\/p>\n

Svetlana’s return to Israel as a full-circle moment<\/p>\n

Svetlana described the journey as a full-circle moment: an opportunity not only to reach a place bound up with her Jewish heritage<\/a>, but to bring a new body of paintings to the country.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the first person in my maternal bloodline in almost 2,000 years to come back,\u201d she said. \u201cTo bring back basically 10 altars to lay on this soil is really beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n

The timing is inseparable from the period after October 7, 2023<\/a>. Svetlana said that the rupture she experienced in relationships in the US, alongside the wider atmosphere she encountered, led to a deep depression and temporarily made painting feel impossible.<\/p>\n

This exhibition marks her return to the studio after that break. Rather than illustrating a single event, the paintings gather pain, images, memories, and the persistent work of survival into color.<\/p>\n

\u201cI take all of that, and I turn it into really beautiful bright colors,\u201d she said. \u201cEven though they come from pain, they all end up as beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition\u2019s title names that process. For Svetlana, What Remains Awake is \u201cwhat\u2019s left after everything burns down\u201d \u2013 memory, ash, residue, and the part of the self that persists while the world appears to be asleep.<\/p>\n

The gallery\u2019s presentation frames the works as deeply autobiographical without treating autobiography as a fixed archive. Names, dates, colors, household patterns, and fragments of family life emerge and recede.
What cannot be seen directly is held within the painting\u2019s layers.<\/p>\n

On raw canvas, Svetlana works with charcoal, acrylic, oil, and spray paint. She writes the names and birth dates of her mother and grandmother into underlayers before covering them with paint.<\/p>\n

The act both preserves and obscures: history is present, but never completely recoverable. Her mother\u2019s death a decade ago sharpened that inquiry.<\/p>\n

An old, seemingly incidental flower doodle from earlier paintings has evolved into a central structural element in the new series \u2013 a dark floral form that she now understands as a frame, or even a home, holding the work together.<\/p>\n

The Root, The Heart, The Will<\/p>\n

The series unfolds in three movements: The Root, The Heart, and The Will.<\/p>\n

In The Root, charcoal and translucent color evoke maternal lineage and the search for an origin. The Heart moves through deep blues and reds, making memory feel close, embodied, and almost tactile.<\/p>\n

The Will, marked by radiant yellow, charcoal, and remnants of lived time, turns from the past toward endurance: the decision to remain present and awake.<\/p>\n

Curator Ellada Ilana Matatoc, an Israeli who also left the former Soviet sphere as a small child, first encountered Svetlana\u2019s work on Instagram in 2019 while working with Mika Gallery.<\/p>\n

The two immediately recognized resonances in the artist\u2019s visual vocabulary, particularly the polka dots that Svetlana associates with Soviet domestic culture: bright, memorable motifs in an environment she recalled as overwhelmingly gray.<\/p>\n

A small number of paintings were shown at the gallery then, but the relationship developed gradually through shared background and Matatov\u2019s sustained response to the work.<\/p>\n

For Matatov, Svetlana\u2019s self-taught position is part of what gives the paintings their particular directness.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe is working on the edges of things,\u201d the curator said, describing an artist whose practice is led by emotion and intuition rather than academic convention.<\/p>\n

Yet Matatov emphasized that her task was not to impose a theme or tell Svetlana what to make: \u201cI saw her art; I didn\u2019t tell her what to create,\u201d she said. \u201cWhenever I see what she did, I\u2019m giving my interpretation to the theory of her practice.\u201d<\/p>\n

That distinction matters in What Remains Awake. The title was chosen by the artist, as were the internal movements of the series.<\/p>\n

Matatov\u2019s curatorial work includes the installation, exhibition text, public program, and the practical care surrounding the works, but it proceeds from an effort to make room for Svetlana\u2019s own confidence and language.<\/p>\n

\u201cA curator is kind of like a producer,\u201d Matatov said, while also returning to the older meaning of the word: to care for, preserve, and tend to art.<\/p>\n

That care is palpable in the installation, where Svetlana\u2019s black-grounded paintings meet the warm limestone walls of the Jaffa gallery.<\/p>\n

Their graphic, almost emblematic shapes carry the intimacy of domestic objects and family inscriptions while retaining the freedom of abstract expressionism. The works do not offer a clean resolution to displacement.<\/p>\n

Instead, they make a place where fragments can coexist: Belarus and Los Angeles, inherited grief and present-day resilience, private memory and collective feeling.<\/p>\n

For Svetlana, simply bringing the paintings across the ocean already counts as a success.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe moment I shipped those paintings, I felt like I did it,\u201d she said. \u201cI could hear all of my maternal line, all my ancestors cheering for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Jaffa, What Remains Awake gives that feeling a physical form: 10 works made from what remains, and from the will to continue.<\/p>\n

Exhibition details: What Remains Awake, a solo exhibition by Sarah Svetlana, opened September 24, 2026, at Mika Contemporary Art Gallery in Jaffa. Curated by Ellada Ilana Matatov.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At Mika Contemporary Art Gallery, the Los Angeles-based artist\u2019s first solo exhibition in Israel turns memory, grief, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635693,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[787,437,434,435,436,1503,438,1903,146,85,46,15032],"class_list":["post-635692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-art","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-culture","tag-design","tag-diaspora","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jaffa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635692","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635692"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635692\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635692"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635692"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635692"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}