Mishkan Museum of Art – Opens 8 August 2025

In 2023, artist Didi Khalifa began creating, in collaboration with ceramicist Noa Platt, a series of vases in the ancient Greek style of “red-figure pottery,” dated to 530 BC. In this technique, the background of the pottery is black while the depicted figures are red. Khalifa used classical vase shapes, including various types of amphorae for wine or oil, a lekythos for pouring oil in ceremonies, and a kylix bowl for drinking wine at banquets. He applied classical decorative elements to the vessels and adorned them with figures of centaurs:creatures from Greek mythology with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse, who are associated with a wild, untamed and violent nature.

Khalifa provides the centaurs with curly sidelocks, yarmulkes, and tefillin. He transforms them into “Hilltop Youth” and uses classical Greek visual language and symbols to ponder religious masculinity, heroism and violence as components of an extremist political identity.Khalifa is positioned in between the principles of his upbringing, common to Israeli colonial settlers, such as loyalty to the State or the Jewish right to the entire historic Land of Israel, and the rampant savagery of the Hilltop Youth. While doing so, he points to the disobedience, anarchy, and violence. This fluctuation between attraction and repulsion is also evident in his character depiction, as well as in the works’ general trajectory.