Artist Shlomo Katz
Accession number 1988-27a
‘Ten Plagues’ is one of ten serigraphs (screen prints) in Shlomo Katz's ‘Passover Portfolio’. Beginning with ‘The Seder’ and ending with ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’, in between Katz re-tells the story of the Exodus in his trademark style inspired by both medieval icons and oriental miniatures. ‘Ten Plagues’ is a triptych with Moses and Aaron in the centre surrounded by scenes of the plagues as shown in stylized vignettes: water turning into blood, frogs, lice, wild animals or flies, pestilence of livestock, boils, locusts, darkness for three days and the death of the firstborn with the thunderstorm of hail and fire as the central image.
Disasters, whether natural or of human initiation, are often the trigger for mass migration. Whether actively sought or a response to natural phenomena, the cumulative force of the ten plagues following one after the other became the trigger for the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. Katz surrounds the central figures in this story – Moses and Aaron – with the disasters that enable the success of their call that Pharoah let their people go.
In this image the stylized depiction of the plagues and the golden icon-derived background play down our sense of the human horror of the plagues and play up our sense of them as divine prompts leading Pharoah to allow his slaves to leave. There is, perhaps, a danger in downplaying the reality of the issues which cause migration to occur as that provides fuel for the fire for any who may wish to raise the bar in terms of who qualifies for refugee protection and thereby restrict entry to their country.
