What Does a Bird Care?! Indifference and Yearning in the Art and Teaching of Mariana Korol

The purpose of the article is to discover how Mariana Korol has applied contradictory duality in her paintings and teaching methods following the artist’s past and present. The research methodology is based on the principles of comprehensiveness, methods of general scientific comparative studies, and formalstylistic and art analyses. The scientific novelty is to identify Mariana Korol’s means to assemble and fuse distant and different cultural elements into a cohesive whole. Conclusions. The results of the study show an inevitable phenomenon of Mariana Korol. Artist and art teacher Mariana Korol’s works constitute an anomalous intersection of Uzbek, Western and Israeli cultures, fused together to form her visual language and its meanings. The fact that she spent most of her adult life teaching art to immigrants and minorities of all ages in Israel adds yet another dimension, as Israel’s typical identity complexities are embodied in her works and her pedagogical philosophy. The critical reading and examination of Korol’s subtle and unique artistic choices offered here mirror a conflicting internal reality that is characteristic of Israeli culture and society. An analysis of two strata is provided. On the one hand, the reading of denotative, iconographic, and visual language, manifested in Korol’s choice to combine images from ancient Uzbek tradition with Western modes of representation and modernist visual language. On the other hand, a connotative layer that charges the works in a reoccurring tension between two poles — indifference and yearning which symbolises dichotomies embedded in Israeli identity. These poles are intertwined in her life, creation, and teaching since immigrating to Israel.