Bank Hapoalim Rug was woven in Afghanistan over the course of a year, with the mediation of the Israeli rugs trader Yitzhak Mattat. Mattat is the descendent of a family of rugs merchants that immigrated to Israel from Pakistan in the 1990’s. A few decades ago, his father established commercial relations with a rug-weaving factory in Afghanistan. Bank Hapoalim Rug is a testament to the work rapport and friendship maintained between the Israeli merchant and Afghani weavers, despite the lack of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
Bank Hapoalim (“the worker’s bank”) was founded in Israel in 1921 based on a socialist worldview. Over the years, this philosophy, which characterized many institutions since the founding of the state, faded. In 1996, a controlling interest in the bank was bought by the Arison group, a company owned by one of the world’s wealthiest Jewish families. Despite the fact that the bank has changed owners and worldviews, it has kept its name – a new ideological value system replaced the old one but inherited its symbols.
The project was presented to the Bank’s board of directors with a request to fund it. What initially appears as a naive image, hides descriptions of looting and robbery. The Bank finally decided not to fund the project and the artist raised the money with courtesy of a private collector.
Woven into the rug is a nostalgic image of the Bank Hapoalim based on its early ideology – a vision that is reminiscent of the conscripted communist art typical of that period. It is possible to view the image from different perspectives, and the more one looks he/she will find that the flat image turns out to be complex. The picture has an encyclopedic quality. Each of the details have a specific allusion, there are more than 100 references, extracted from early Israeli art, archeological objects, socialist posters, socialist art, Renaissance art, symbols of Israeli sovereignty (e.g. paper money, coins and stamps) and much more. The project includes a comprehensive glossary of terms with referrals to the original elements, an explanation of the historical context, as well as their meaning and role within the framework of the rug.
The documentary tracks the fabrication process of the rug and showcases the numerous stages of production. The process represented reveals a different rug of time and economics from those generally accepted in the Western world, which elicits a sense of awe and artifice.
Rug weaving is an ancient traditional method of knowledge transfer. It requires the capacity for memorization and implementation of mathematical principles. The craft is passed down from generation to generation and perfected over the years. The encoded traditions vary from place to place and are expressed in different samples. They are produced in a chain of manpower similar to a small industry model before the machine age.
Bank Hapoalim Rug is a synthesis of ideologies and conflicting perspectives merged together. It furnishes the Western viewer with a glimpse of Afghani modes of rug production and exposes a variety of Israeli symbols to the weavers: What did they think while they were weaving it? How did they translate its displayed social structure and did they decipher its secrets? The final rug contains small inaccuracies that were produced in the “translation:” minor changes in symbols, facial expressions, and focuses on certain parts of the composition – the “handwriting” of the weavers and the artist becomes so mixed that you can no longer separate the two.
The various languages that are blended into the rug make it particularly difficult to categorize. Is this an ethnographic object or a work of contemporary art? Does it represent a socialist or capitalist ideology? Is it subversive or celebratory of Bank Hapoalim? (A similar example is Andy Warhol’s coke bottles, which could be seen at once as a critique and an advertisement in the museum space). Is it a piece that is representative of a culture based on small industry or Western tendencies to outsource their work to the ends of the earth?
The CDA's archives are operating with the support of the Ostrovsky Family Fund and Artis
