Contemporary Israeli Women Artists’ Critical Exploration of
Border Constructs and Identities
“In the ceremonial declaration of the state of Israel,
taking place in Tel Aviv in 1948, only men sat at the declaration table.
Despite the heroic Zionist tale of equality between men and women, the real
plot of Zionism is told by men, the male body leading and characterizing it.
The new country asked for men: they died for it and toiled in ploughing its
soil. Men had established an army for the new country and designed, to minute
detail, the culture of power” (Tamir, 2006, p. 134). The masculine Zionist
construct of power is evident in art, as well, with art before the 1960s being
composed largely of lyrical abstract landscapes that depicted “an optimistic
picture of the country being built. Pessimistic or critical statements were
covered up or censored, and generally hardly created at all” (p. 134).
It is in this way, that Zionism not only constructed
masculine power structures, but also created an artistic environment in which
art was to be created not for the purposes of raising critical questions or
representing subjective experience, but for the purposes of supporting a
particular vision of Israel. After the 1960s, more critical work emerged and
eventually more recently more contemporary work by Israeli women artists. Contemporary
art by female Israeli artists in the last decade looks into “other options of
identity and activity wishing to expand, confound and shift the local option’s
range of thought towards new realms” (p. 136).
This paper/video aims to explore the work of female Israeli
artists working in the last decade who raise challenging questions in their
work about border constructs/identities and the “perception of femininity and
masculinity in the local ethos” (p. 136). What issues can be raised by Israeli
women about border identities working through artistic means that are perhaps
not readily heard in more typical policy writing and political debates? Artists
that I am currently researching include: Ariella Azoulay, Keren Assaf, Yael
Bartana, Varda Getzow, Andi Arnovitz, Raya Brukental, Orit Freilich, Nechama Golan, Chana
Goldberg, Hadassah Goldvicht, Hila Karabelnikov-Paz, Ruth Kestenbaum Ben Dov,
Chagit Molgan, Rivka Potchebutzky, Ruth Schreiber, Studio Armadillo (Anat
Stein, Hadas Kruk), Dafna Shalom, Keinan Sigalit Landau, Rona Yefman. Is
there something about artmaking that offers an opportunity for critical
dialogue that is different then other means?
The paper and presentation will first follow a more
traditional format and apply the broad question of how these artists explore
questions of border identities and constructs in their work as a starting point
through which to narrow the scope and focus into more refined paths of
investigation. The presentation will share key concepts from the work, a
comparative analysis of the works, and images of the works with the class in a
PowerPoint.
The video will be my own artistic response to the issues
raised by the artists in regard to border identities focusing particularly on
my own relationship as a non-Zionist Jew to Jerusalem and Israel more
generally. Questions of what constitutes “home” and hybrid identity will be
explored.
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