Full Breakdown
Sarah Svetlana’s “What Remains Awake” Opens at Mika Contemporary Art Gallery in Jaffa
By Drooid · · How we work
Exhibition Overview
Mika Contemporary Art Gallery in Jaffa is hosting the Los Angeles-based painter Sarah Svetlana’s first solo show in Israel. Titled What Remains Awake, the exhibition presents ten large canvases that blend bright acrylics, charcoal, oil and spray paint on raw canvas. The works are installed against the gallery’s warm limestone walls, creating a dialogue between the paintings’ dark grounds and the historic stone-vaulted space. As of September 9, 2026, the show remains on view, offering visitors a visual exploration of inherited displacement and personal grief.
From Soviet Belarus to Los Angeles: Svetlana’s Journey
Born in 1985 to a Belarusian-Jewish family, Svetlana left the Soviet Union in 1989 and grew up in the United States. She describes her practice as rooted in “exile, assimilation, finding home” “My work has always revolved around exile, assimilation, finding home,” — Sarah Svetlana. The timing of the show is linked to the scheduled date of October 7, 2023, which Svetlana cites as a period that intensified her personal rupture and prompted a temporary halt to painting.
Curatorial Collaboration with Ellada Ilana Matatov
Ellada Ilana Matatov, an Israeli curator who also emigrated from the former Soviet sphere, first encountered Svetlana’s work on Instagram in 2019. Matatov likens the curator’s function to that of a producer “A curator is kind of like a producer,” — Matatov, noting that she handles installation, exhibition text and the practical care of the works while preserving the artist’s intuitive approach.
Themes of Memory, Exile and Resilience
The series is organized into three movements—The Root, The Heart, and The Will—each employing distinct color palettes and layered inscriptions of family names and birth dates. Svetlana writes her mother’s and grandmother’s names into underlayers before covering them, a process that both preserves and obscures lineage. A recurring dark floral motif, evolved from an earlier doodle, serves as a structural “home” within the compositions. By shipping the paintings across the ocean, Svetlana reports feeling the presence of her ancestors cheering her on, a symbolic “altar” laid on Israeli soil. The exhibition thus offers a space where fragments of Belarusian heritage, Los Angeles experience, inherited grief and present-day resilience coexist.