Conceptio

A short-lived movement, Canaanism was launched in the late 1930s by several European-Jewish artists and writers—its proponents believed that long before Judaism and Islam were part of the Middle East, the region was home to an ancient Hebrew nation. The Canaanites wanted to revive the identity of this 3,000-year-old civilization in the hopes of creating a country that embraced all of the region’s population, rather than dividing them by religion or ethnicity.

Michael Parekowhai’s Canaan was created in this spirit. “A land flowing with milk and honey” was written to describe Israel in the Bible. The phrase has also been popularized in modern times as an epithet for the artist’s native New Zealand. The sculpture alludes to this very Biblical reference as well as the benign exoticization of Parekowhai’s homeland, its title striking a deliberate resonance with Canaanist objectives. Text is wielded as a symbol, revealing the artist’s promise of the unbreakable and singular connection we share with one another.