In this exhibition, four contemporary Israeli artists hold a complex dialogue with the history of western art in relation to their Israeli-Mizrahi identity. Their works refer to Giorgio Agamben's claim that in order to create a new present and future, one must critically read the past and question its effects. The past the artists refer to in this exhibition is the history of Western art on which they cultivated, in Israel, despite their oriental roots and despite their presence in the Middle East.

In the exhibition, the artists raise questions about their own position towards their "Orientalism," about the attitude they express toward the history of Western art, and about the complex relationship between the Israeli art world and the modern Eurocentric art world.

Guy Levy's oil paintings depict an "orientalist" Mediterranean environment in a festive atmosphere accompanied by a feeling of end-of-days by using black humor and grotesque imagery. Levy's dialogue with art history is ambivalent: a "love-hate" relationship which is expressed, on the one hand, in various picturesque gestures inspired by German Expressionism, Matisse and other Western artists, while on the other hand there is social criticism indicated by his choices of images.

In one of his central works in the exhibition, "Al Anisat min al-Basra" (literally translated from Arabic: "The Maidens of Basra"), there is a tribute to Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". In his original painting, Picasso, influenced by primitive art, depicts the women of the Avignon brothel almost as African statues or masks. This was part of a dominant orientalist trend of the period, which often presented the women of the East as possessing an exotic and wild sexuality. In his painting, Levy presents the Iraqi women of Basra in a way that openly and consciously exposes their orientalism. First, they are not African statues but flesh-and-blood women. Second, they are distinctly "Eastern" women. The question of orientalism is sharpened further by the Greek column on the right side of the painting, which is joined to an arch characteristic of Muslim architecture. This combination emphasizes the connection between Eastern and Western culture.

Tal Shochat’s video art work "Feast" is a feminist, oriental and critical tribute to Da Vinci's "The Last Supper". The work depicts a women-only banquet, but instead of sitting around a table like in “The Last Supper," they are situated on carpets as they hold a middle eastern-style feast. The women eat with exaggerated gestures, emphasizing signs that are supposed to express desire, liberation, etc. The critique of the work is directed both at the history of Western art and at representations that are considered oriental and orientalist

In addition, Shochat presents a photograph titled "Mona in a Black Dress", which is a direct but inverted tribute to Velázquez's "Las Meninas". In the original painting, the Infanta Margarita of Spain is portrayed surrounded by maids and family members. In Shochat's photograph, the Infanta is in fact the artist's daughter, Mona, a descendant of her Persian family. Around her stand the women of the family, the figure farthest to the left being Shochat's mother, that is, the grandmother. Instead of standing in a relatively dark and opulent room in the Spanish palace, the figures stand in the center of a white industrial kitchen. Another strong inversion in the work is the black color of the dress Mona wears, as opposed to the Infanta's white dress. This inversion sends the viewer to another reference from the history of Western art: the inversion of the white dog in Titian's "Venus of Urbino" into the black cat in Manet's "Olympia". All the women of the family surrounding Mona are elegantly dressed in white dresses and skirts, while her mother wears a "simple" housedress that is neither white nor black.

Vicki Skandarion will exhibit a body of works composed of paintings and sculptures. The female figures in her paintings bring to mind ancient fertility figurines as well as Christian iconography. The figures are painted with brown oil paint, and appear rich and muddy on the shiny white Perspex surfaces. In her work, Skandarion refers to the representation of the pure white woman throughout the history of art. The women in her paintings appear nude, broad and seem bigger than life.

Skandarion's sculptural works include sculptures made of "loofah" (a type of climbing plant), usually used for bathing and scrubbing the body. The use of this material corresponds with critical questions about the "cleanliness" of the Eastern female body, which was once perceived as "impure" compared with the "white" Western body. The sculptures evoke female genitalia and also correspond with the concept of "abjection" as coined by Kristeva. The loofah, a bathing tool historically associated with the "women of the East", symbolized an intimate, concealed and orthodox place in the life of the "Eastern woman". In Skandarion's sculptures, by contrast, desires, grotesque and sexuality burst forth alongside hidden secrets, both in the imagery and in the sculptural materials themselves.

Tamir Zadok will present a number of photography works featuring motifs of orientalism and Arabism as they were represented in Israeli art during the founding of Bezalel in the early 20th century. The representation of the oriental and the Arab in art was established in this period as a fabricated starting point for the history of Israeli art. Thus, in his video art work “The Painters”, Zadok is paraphrasing the story of the biblical spies and his orientalist representation.

Two of the artist's nephews play the models in the story of the spies, while the artist himself appears in the same scene as one of the painters. Zadok plays a "double game": he takes an active part in the situation, but also observes it with a critical, external gaze.

Alongside the video work, Zadok presents a photograph of a "flying carpet" to which white helium balloons are tied. The work was photographed in the context of his exhibition "Gaza Envelope" (shown in the region in 2018), which offered a contemporary reference to the incendiary balloons that set fire to the fields of the Gaza Envelope area. Zadok refers to the orientalist carpet images that often represented the East in Western art and literature. In fact, the carpet in the photograph is made of paper, and so it raises the question of authenticity versus forgery. In a place where incendiary kites are launched, Zadok's flying carpet is also a lyrical fantasy of peace gestures between different peoples, and between East and West.

What the works in the exhibition have in common seems to be a critical gaze directed at the Western-art past, with its orientalist outlook. At the same time, the works can also be seen as an optimistic point of view that seeks to bridge the Eastern-Arab identity and a multicultural Jewish Israeliness. The exhibition "The Last Feast" asks how we can represent a new "Mizrahi-ness" without falling into the traps of our not-so-distant past in both Western and Israeli art.