Artist Statement

She’erit, שְׁאֵרִית, is the Hebrew word for “remnant.” It evokes what survives erasure, what endures exile, what persists across generations despite the forces of assimilation and antisemitism. This exhibition travels through Morocco, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates to gather pieces of memory, identity, and culture, sewing them together to tell a story of Jewish persistence.

Each work, whether painted, carved, or filmed, is both a testament and a tool for survival and continuity. They are not passive reflections of loss, but active protests: refusals to disappear, to be flattened, to be silenced. They speak from and through the feminine, the hands and faces of women who preserve history through thread and bread, rosewater and Moorish tiles.

Rooted in the intersecting spiritual and cultural lineages of Amazigh and Sephardi heritage, the exhibition transforms devastation into art, not to beautify pain, but to dignify indigenous inheritance against the erasures of colonial Islamist ideology. This is a reclamation of narrative, of space, of voice, and breath.

In a time obsessed with binaries and performative activism, She’erit invites you to pause, to dwell in complexity, and to piece together a story that resists flattening. This is not just an exhibition. It is the phenomenological testimony of a woman—diasporic yet Indigenous, transnational yet deeply rooted—and through her, it becomes the story of a people who
refuse to be silenced.

About the Artist

Chama Mechtaly is a Moroccan-born artist, founder, cultural strategist, and peacebuilder whose work exists at the intersection of art, identity, and policy.

With Amazigh, Jewish, and Muslim backgrounds, her practice navigates the complexities of belonging in spaces that often demand indigenous erasure.

Through mixed media, installations, and public storytelling, Chama turns silencing into testimony. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Jerusalem Biennale in 2019 and 2021. Her first participation was hidden, as she sent her work quietly under threat of censorship. Chama’s art was repeatedly censored in Morocco, and unfortunately, after October 7th, it was also censored in Boston though she has always stood for peace-building. Through the Abraham Accords, Chama co-produced and co-curated Maktoub, a celebration of Arab-Jewish reconciliation in Jerusalem, an initiative celebrated by the UK minister of state James Cleverly. She is now leading art diplomacy initiatives for the Abraham Accords Institute for Peace and Regional Integration.

As Co-Founder and Executive Director of the Emma Lazarus Institute, Chama champions cultural deradicalization and integration in the Middle East, using art as well as public and cultural diplomacy as tools for building sustainable bridges. Her work confronts the intersection of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, and progressive gaslighting, while celebrating the resilience of Indigenous people.

Since October 7th, she has watched her community reel, not only from horror and heartbreak, but from a second violence: being told Jewish grief doesn’t matter, Jewish lives don’t count, Jewish identity is too complicated to hold space for. This exhibition says otherwise.