The aesthetics of caricature permeate Israeli artist David Adika’s current exhibition at Braverman Gallery’s sprawling new space. On display is “Black Market” (all works 2020), a series of photographs of Orientalist figurines produced by Tel Aviv–based manufacturers around the time that bourekas were popular. Wearing “traditional” dress and jewelry, and painted with red lips, the figurines, which can now be found at local flea markets and antique stores, reflect an exoticized and homogeneous view of blackness. For Adika, who is himself Mizrachi, these dolls symbolize a broader tendency to distort images of the other.

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