The Sudanese Refugee: Portrait

    Shulamit Covo's spectacular artwork "The Sudanese Boy" (2023) offers a surprising, new perspective on the Israeli people's ambivalent attitude towards the African refugees who have been living in southern Tel Aviv since the mid-1990s. Her artwork portrays the African boy as a composition of a light-skinned boy in yellow, amber, pink, and light blue, and a shadowed, abstracted black face scattered by small blue, white, and pink dots. Significantly, this artwork, like most of Covo's unique creations, consists of beads that have been meticulously pasted to the canvas.

As the only Israeli artist who intensively deploys this unique technique, Covo transgresses racial boundaries and ethnic dichotomies, and she transforms the anonymous Sudanese boy's daily life into a dramatic, somewhat theatrical, campy spectacle of lively pop art, on the one hand, and it critically explores the mythicization, demonization, stigmatization, and eroticization of this African youth, on the other hand.

Covo's laborious work echoes prominent women artists who use traditional "womanly" crafts in their dissident, feminist artwork, particularly the influential Afro-American artist Kara Walker who is best known for her room-size tableaux of black cut-paper silhouettes. Although Covo's aesthetics are vastly different than Walker's aesthetics, they both use typical feminine crafts in their social and political criticism of historical and contemporary racism, xenophobia, segregation, and discrimination.

Yet Covo's "The Sudanese Boy" also echoes Francis Bacon's characteristic paintings of semi-erased, twisted faces that vibrantly embody the unique, dramatic dynamics of chiaroscuro, an interplay between light and shade, explicitness and implicitness, boldness and subtleties, materiality, and transcendentality.

In the Israeli art world, Covo's artwork interrelates with Ohad Meromi's monumental sculpture "The Boy from South Tel Aviv" which is displayed at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Meromi's figure of an African male nude is 19.7 feet (6 meters) tall and is made of Styrofoam, paper, hair, and plastic beads. Like Covo's artwork, Meromi's sculpture oscillates between humanization and mythologization of ethnic and social otherness. These Israeli artists' materialization of young, blossoming black masculinity and physique deliberately confront the prevalent bigotry and hostility in Israeli society.

Covo's "The Sudanese Boy," in particular, sophisticatedly converges whiteness and blackness, realism and surrealism, and reality and fantasy, while interchanging hegemony and marginality, and creating a hybridity of multiethnic youthfulness.

The boy's African identity is theatrically colored white (practically, yellow) and, concomitantly, it is half-covered by a sort of abstracted blackness. In this way, Covo deconstructs whiteness and blackness, and she denaturalizes racist cultural classifications. In this way, the African boy's subaltern position is colorfully decolonized.