The Days of Sadat | Hagai Farago
Curator: Sofie Berzon MacKie
Curatorial assistant: Tal Simon
Winner of Be’eri Gallery Art Award #3 at Freshpaint Art Fair. The prize is awarded annually by Be’eri Gallery’s curatorial team, to an artist selected from the Freshpaint Greenhouse. This marks the prize’s third year.
On November 19, 1977, at 20:06, Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, landed in Israel. He was the first Arabic leader to formally visit the country. Following the Yom Kippur War, Saadat made three presidential visits, paving the way towards a peace agreement with Egypt and declaring that the conflict between the states and the Middle East would not be resolved by force, but rather through peaceful means. His visits built a bridge to an enemy state, whose history is closely intertwined with that of the state of Israel and its people. Sadat, often perceived as a dull leader and an uneducated villager, brought about—together with Menachem Begin—a historical peace agreement, and a shared Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. Anwar Sadat paid for this with his life.
From where we stand today, in 2025, it feels almost fictional. The intensities and dissolution of the current war, cast a strange sheen over the materials that Farago works with. It was probably similar back then; you can’t help but think about it. The proximity in timing between the outbreak of the wars, the ‘Conception,’ the false sense of security, the civil and systemic shock, and the political crisis that led to Golda Meir’s resignation. When similar historical events overlap, they illuminate one another, lending past and present a material tangibility; this allows for a connection to the people whose lives have inhabited our story. It also sheds light on the possibility of reconstructing things that the future brought to their doorstep, first through groping, meetings in secret, and eventually with a colorful burst of confetti beneath a gate that read: “Haifa Wishes you Joy and Peace.”
Peace.
We know what war looks like. History and everyday life saturate us with images and myths; culture, in its many forms, is steeped in visions of conflict and violence. But what does this peace look like? How does culture formulate and create ways to incorporate what has been labeled as the enemy at a time covered in war paint?
Hagai Farago takes on the role of a secret agent, approaching the task of writing the theater of peace through calculated ways. He carves a world of dramatic and cinematic images out of history in his screen-printing works. He re-translates an event settled only partly and unsteadily in our memory. Sifting through hundreds of archival materials reveals the vast network that gave rise to this chapter in local history. Farago distills from its key points, in the unbelievable story that happened in reality – Peace planned in shadows and showcased throughout city streets.
Both nations succeeded in creating a visual culture, rich with symbols and meanings that held the possibility of a different reality between them. Moshe Dayan, wearing a wig, fake mustache, and sunglasses, arranged a secret meeting at the court of the King of Morocco. The presidential Yacht cruised through the Suez Channel and docked at the port of Haifa. Telegrams, flags and standard-bearers, guards of honor, and menus in Arabic; speeches crafted to express respect and a sense of kinship with the characteristics of both cultures and their shared history; secret meetings in smoke-filled rooms. On his first visit to Cairo, Menachem Begin handed President Sadat a diplomatic gift – a bent sword (khopesh); the sword, a thousand-year-old symbol of the “Swords to Plowshares” concept – a similar artifact found in Tutankhamun’s tomb. The original is on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
Farago’s familial history is encoded into the broader narrative of relationships among the region’s peoples. His grandfather, Avraham Cohen, an officer and diplomat, was sent in his youth to Bagdad by Abdullah the I, King of Jordan. He and his brother, Mendel Cohen, the famous carpenter from Jerusalem, were dispatched on an architectural research mission to build the king’s winter palace in Shuna, Transjordan. In a subtle maneuver, Farago draws on his family’s historical material and their direct and covert connections with the region’s countries to reconstruct how people and nations once collaborated on a land shaped by an ancient, shared story.
Fifty years after this unusual story unfolded, a cultural, symbolic conversation emerges in the absence of a civil dialog, gesturing toward a possible future.
“Ladies and gentlemen … peace is not a mere endorsement of written lines but a rewriting of history. Peace is not a game of calling for peace to defend certain whims or hide certain ambitions. Peace is a giant struggle against all and every ambition and whim. Perhaps the examples taken from ancient and modern history teach us all that missiles, warships, and nuclear weapons cannot establish security. Rather, they destroy what peace and security build. For the sake of our peoples and for the sake of the civilizations made by man, we have to defend man everywhere against the rule of the force of arms so that we may endow the rule of humanity with all the power of the values and principles that promote the sublime position of Mankind.”
Anwar Sadat’s address to the Knesset, November 20, 1977
