INHERENT ARTWORK BY RONEN AZULAY

In his series entitled Our Legacy, Ronen Azulay constructs a deeply personal visual archive that reframes family memory as both artistic material and cultural testimony. Composed of intricately assembled mosaics made from reclaimed fabrics and leather remnants, each work becomes a fragment in a larger meditation on identity, displacement, and resilience. What emerges is not a nostalgic reconstruction of the past, but an active process of reckoning with heritage, erasure, and survival

At the center of this body of work is a singular point of reference: the El-Keswa El-Kbira, a ceremonial Moroccan wedding dress passed down through Azulay’s Sephardic lineage. This heirloom, saturated with both historical specificity and symbolic weight, anchors the work in the lived aesthetics of the North African Jewish diaspora, a heritage that has often been silenced or subordinated within broader narratives of Jewish identity

The materials Azulay employs—recycled textiles, worn leather, communal fragments—carry with them both physical and affective histories. Their reuse speaks to a broader logic of cultural preservation through transformation. The works do not offer a singular narrative, but rather a complex visual cartography of dislocation and inheritance. In confronting the histories that have been obscured or diminished, Azulay foregrounds the political dimension of identity as both contested and constructed

Presented against the backdrop of renewed violence and rupture in Israel and the broader Middle East, the exhibition gains further urgency. Azulay’s act of looking inward becomes a prompt for collective reflection: How does heritage function not only as personal anchor but as ethical compass? How do the stories we carry shape the moral legacy we leave behind?