Zarut (Strangeness) by Raida Adon

Featured at the Israel Museum during the summer of 2021, Raida Adon’s exhibition Zarut (Strangeness) explored physical and spiritual roots that create a sense of home. Oscillating between stability and fragility, the artwork in the exhibition grapples with one’s connection to home, land, and the world. In this series of images and film, Adon sets up her home in a suitcase, underscoring the tensions between the rootlessness of wandering and the roots that continue to ground and shape us when we move away from our home.

Whereas Zarut displays her home within the suitcase, the piece “A Woman Without a Home” takes the bed out of the home and sets it in the middle of the sea. The bed symbolizes the rootlessness of the floating figure and at the same time imparts a sense of safety and stability. Shifting between personal and collective roots, Adon implicitly addresses her Palestinian and Israeli identities, with all the contradictions surrounding her roots in Israeli society that arise therein.

AS YOU LOOK AT THE PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS COLLECTION, CONSIDER:

Raida Adon’s artwork explores the relationship between home and rootlessness. What kind of feeling does her art convey surrounding the notion of home?
When might a suitcase provide us with a sense of home? When might it indicate a state of rootless wandering?
Adon’s exhibition is called Zarut, the Hebrew word for “strangeness” or “being foreign.” When do your roots make you disconnected from something, and when do they offer a sense of belonging?
What do you carry within your suitcase to provide a feeling of home while away?