"A Love Letter to Myself" is the first solo exhibition of Rachel Anyo, photographer, multidisciplinary artist, and social activist from Kiryat Yam. The center of her work deals with identity and brings a unique and layered voice that expands the discussion and perspective on photography and contemporary Ethiopian-Israeli art.

Her work draws inspiration from sources of Ethiopian folklore art and tradition on the one hand. It is connected to the contemporary digital space in the global era from which she draws inspiration and exists. The craft of traditional hand weaving is translated in Anyo's works into a digital weaving of images that she photographs, disassembles, and reassembles.

The works in the exhibition begin with the biography from Anyo's family photo album from her childhood, which she examines with a nostalgic, close, and even critical view, and through it develops a self-aware personal identity within a peripheral and traditional community. A high point lies in the (documented) memory of her own Bat Mitzvah ceremony, which is the point of no return of inner change and disillusionment for her.

In Anyo's works, the family photographs become raw material she passes through a "digital laboratory," reproduces, disassembles, and creates collages, mandalas, and wallpapers. These woven surfaces, made of pieces of life, people, body, memories, and objects, create new images culturally and aesthetically and reflect the generation gap between the generation of immigrants from Ethiopia and children born in Israel.

At the exhibition's opening, a photograph of the couple's parents in their youth looks as if they have come out of a broken wall covered with floral wallpaper or are being covered in it and almost disappearing. The photograph of Rachel's Bat Mitzvah is handled and echoes the moment of disillusionment and horror. Her face looks like a bleached mask, as expressionless as a shell. Photography and assembly of personal household objects and symbols receive renewed meaning and appropriation, such as the photograph of the traditional talisman, a photograph of a "Hamsa" hand holding an improvised eye, a photograph of a menorah at first glance reminiscent of a traditional Jewish object, but actually, a collage of fingers and long artificial nails painted in red varnish masquerading as candle flames.

The video work focuses on family interactions between the parents and their children. It reveals the fragments of immigration: the mother's failed attempt to teach her teenage son her forgotten language, the father's tired look at his daughter holding the camera and giving directing instructions, situations of forced intimacy between the father and son, and ending with a liberated interaction of Rachel and her brother dance in the living room, drumming on their bare bellies to the sounds of Ethiopian music and traditional dances. The home celebration creates an emotional catharsis that connects tradition, culture, and holiday to everyday, domestic, and contemporary reality.

Memories and language fade and are forgotten; they are evidence of the Israeli "melting pot," which is alienated and intolerant of signs of "exile." The personal and collective immigration crisis, the cultural and personal erasure, the lack of acceptance, and the imperative to "be one cultural piece" is the failed attempt of "Israelism" to ignore a cultural wealth with deep roots. Rachel Anyo is aware of this, and she draws inspiration and strength from her mother's house and its unique tradition.

Anyo's self-portrait photographs, repeated in different variations in the exhibition, accompany and document Rachel from childhood to a mature and creative woman. Eyes are a recurring motif in the exhibition. The artist's eyes are wide open. They are duplicated, watching, witnessing, cameras, guards, and examining. Eyes examining the patriarchal Western world outside, but also turning inward to the soul.

The works continue to develop and deepen in more universal critical contexts, taking part in the global discourse of contemporary art and photography regarding personal and cultural identity in the context of the color of the skin, its texture, its various shades, the signs of the female body in its journey in search of alternative spaces to create identity, acceptance and a place in the world.

The dismemberment of the body in black and white photographs replicates, and as if testing what pain is, the handcuffs being tightened on body parts look painful, almost stopping the blood from flowing.
Vulnerability is also strength; the pain has become passion and creation, bringing liberation and self-acceptance. The series that dismantles and reassembles the body creates new metaphysical images of a new contemporary identity that recognizes its value.

The surprise in the last part of the exhibition takes place in the reconstruction of "creatures," bold and unidentified characters from other worlds, which also appear as a pattern of "African cloth." The exhibition closes with a photograph of a black rectangle (a sort of reference to Malevich) which, when viewed closely, consists of dark-skinned body doubles, thus humorously tightening the polarities between the local and the universal, between the figurative and the abstract, between painting and photography, between Western modernism and contemporary Israeli and Ethiopian art.

Rachel Anyo's photographic work juggles boldness, power, generosity, and a passion for travel. Questions of visibility, feminism, and a universal social and cultural context resonate with essential inner questions of self-existence. The experience of viewing the exhibition is a rich and exposed adventure journey, inviting a walk on the bridge of pain, transitioning to a new reality, connected to the past, and walking upright on a new path.

Rona Yefman, July 2023