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Exploring the flora and fauna of the land of pre-state Israel stood at the heart of the Zionist venture. Zionist institutions took efforts to educate the Jewish population, trying to connect it to the land by learning it. This involved various ways of familiarising children and adults with their surroundings, with botanical illustration as an important agent working for that cause. This article aims to examine the three botanical women illustrators who contributed significantly to Israeli science and art, followed by three contemporary women artists whose art is inspired by them. Using a methodology combining visual analysis with the artists' interviews, it will be demonstrated how botanical illustration of the past is embedded in contemporary art. Both share a perception of plants as crucial elements populating the planet, and as objects of aesthetic investigation. These perceptions have led to various attitudes: first, exploring the plant in nature and observing it thoroughly throughout the artistic process. Second, the image created remains botanically identifiable, thus echoing a scientific approach. Third, the plant's Hebrew name is sometimes included. The noticeable inspiration of historical illustrators for contemporary artists lies both in the choices of the images themselves and in the practice of creating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines works by two Orthodox artists, an American, Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939) and an Israeli, Hagit Molgan (b. 1972), both concerned with the Jewish laws and rituals of niddah (menstruation) and tevilah (immersion). The analysis of the similarities and differences between works from two major Jewish centers, Israel and the United States, provides insight into how critical responses in works of art point to complex cultural divides. Scholars and curators of Jewish art tend to examine Jewish-Israeli art as distinct from Jewish art created elsewhere. Due to this disconnect, the relationship between Jewish-Israeli art and its patrons around the world has received little attention before now. Consequently, the discussion of art created in different spaces and times contributes to a richer, more contextualized understanding of diasporic art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its political ideology, large sectors of Israeli society hold the belief that only people who share its ethnocratic values can share the same hygiene identity with it, reflecting its self-perception as a pure national subject. This is the context in which scatological works based on radical materialism and ethical critique first appeared in Israeli performance and video art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The artworks under discussion seek to consider humankind as machines that produce waste, with an emphasis on the excess waste that separates those who are excluded from the dominant Israeli-nationalist-Zionist view or discourse. Some artists employ excrement as a tool to degrade power structures, while others see it as a source of creativity and an alternative way of material and ethical life. Performing feces, or being shit, constitutes a position of creation, observation, and being to which we should pay particular attention at this moment in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

João Delgado's poetry first appeared as an anthology of translated poetry in He'arat Shulaym Issue 1, published in November 2001 in Jerusalem by the artist collective Sala-Manca. The entire issue was devoted to João Delgado. Delgado was a Portuguese-Argentinean poet, born in Lisbon circa 1920 (or not), who left Portugal as a political refugee for Buenos Aires. He disappeared in 1976 during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Since 1976, there has been no trace of his fate, although new fragments of his work are constantly being discovered, translated, and published by the Sala-Manca group. There is no evidence of any originals of his work. Literary critics in Israel praised Delgado's poetry and art and even identified previously unknown relationships to poets and artists from the European avantgarde. In Sala-Manca's artistic work, dating back two decades, João Delgado and his heteronyms would have a central role and focus, blurring the boundaries of the group, blurring the fictional with the "real", and proposing a subjectivity that embraces multiplicity and dispersion. Translating his poetry into Hebrew, a foreign language (to Delgado), and bringing it into print for the first time in neither its original language nor the cultural context in which it was created may be seen as a kind of de-contextualization of the poet's poetry, since Delgado always kept himself and his oeuvre connected to the immediate surroundings where it was produced. On the other hand, perhaps it is actually this possibility—to "become only in translation"—that is one of the outstanding characteristics of Delgado's poetry, emblematic of its linguistic and conceptual elasticity. This paper examines João Delgado's poetic work in relation to Sala-Manca's artistic work and the way in which both Sala-Manca and Delgado create a "system of life" by being heteronyms of one another, allowing for a multiplicity of identities, and stressing the relation to Others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does Zionism's relation to Mizrahi women affect their situated imagination of identity? This article offers an answer to the question through a close reading of artworks by third-generation Mizrahi women artists. In their works the artists reveal a struggle between their lived experience of an emotional burden; an intergenerational inheritance assigned to them against their will: cleaning work, and the desire to imagine a future beyond it and the social limitations that constructed it. Against the backdrop of this struggle, and in response to it, I argue that the artists use their work as an arena of Mizrahi feminist situated imagination through which they negotiate their forced identity and resist the emotional politics in Mizrahi women's cleaning work using artistic identity management strategies to seek a sense of worth. They do so while creating a shift from the institutional construction of Mizrahi women's image in Zionist visual colonial archives as the voiceless racialized intranational "others" of Zionism, to their own self-imaging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a gender-based re-reading, re-appreciation, and re-contextualization of the endeavors and works of several Israeli women artists in the 1980s. Adopting a mixed method (visual, gender, and critical research) and based on archival data and current interviews, it sheds light on silenced aspects in the works of women artists but also expands on the way aesthetics and politics in the field of art are understood within the dominant symbolic order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on two parafictional figures created by Israeli artists at about the same time in the early 2000s: Oreet Ashery's Marcus Fisher and Roee Rosen's Justine Frank. Through a close reading of these case studies, I examine the phenomenon of parafictional characters as extreme cases of voice appropriation. Against the background of rising international concern with cultural appropriation, and of the Israeli sociopolitical context characterized by a multiplicity of often conflicting identities, I argue that such appropriation is, in fact, a basic aesthetic procedure. Using Hannah Arendt's reading of Immanuel Kant's aesthetic judgment as political judgment, and her articulation of an "enlarged mentality" as necessary for both aesthetic and political thinking, the article demonstrates how the ability to imagine a position different from your own is inherent for aesthetic representation as well as reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of Jewish-Israeli men of Ethiopian descent has undergone deep-seated changes in the last decade, as evident in visual representations created by contemporary black artists living in Israel. In recent years, a new generation of Ethiopian-Israeli artists has revitalized local art and engendered deep changes in discourse and public life. Ethiopian-Israelis, who comprise less than two percent of the total Jewish population in the country, suffers multiple forms of oppression, especially due to their religious status and given that their visibility—as black Jews—stands out in a society that is predominantly white. This article draws links between events of the past decade and the images of men produced by these artists. It argues that the political awareness of Jewish-Ethiopians artists, generated by long-term social activism as well as police violence against their community, has greatly impacted their artistic production, broadened its diversity, and contributed a wealth of artworks to Israeli culture as a whole. Using intersectional analysis and drawing on theories from gender, migration and cultural studies, the article aims to produce a nuanced understanding of black Jewish masculinity in the ethno-national context of the state of Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses a body of works by the video artist Ruth Patir, in which Israeli womanhood in the 2020s is interrogated through Iron Age female statuettes, known as Judean Pillar Figurines. By means of motion capture technology and 3D animation, Patir features contemporary Israeli women uncannily moving and speaking through the bodies of millennium-old female figurines, whose history and function are still under debate. In Petah Tikva (2020), Patir situates these hybrid figures in a modern IVF clinic, offering a biopolitical perspective on Israeli society's compelling maternal impulse. Marry Fuck Kill (2019), in turn, ponders Israeli women's legitimation of their femininity, across the generational gap between the artist and her mother, here cast in the role of an imposing Iron Age figurine. The paper addresses Patir's work in both biopolitical and phenomenological terms, arguing that the sensual appeal of the archaeological objects often undermines the videos' political critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interpretation of the works by the Israeli–Druze photographer Amira Ziyan, focusing on a series of photographs from 2017. These portray reenactments of actions identified with traditional roles of women in Druze society, such as cooking and cleaning. Employing a unique visual language and choice of form and content, the artist depicts a confrontation between a clear set of rigid and traditional boundaries and values and a contemporary, post-modern reality in which these boundaries and values are blurred. The interpretive reading proposed here describes a synergy between visual codes of minorities and accepted visual codes of their surrounding pervasive culture in contemporary Israel. Ziyan's work offers a glimpse into visual codes of "otherness" that express the inner world of an artist who grew up on the margins of society but strove to be accepted as an essential part of its main artistic current. Focusing on this perspective contributes to ongoing discourse regarding contradictions inherent in Israeli society and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

'Leave your psychopathic behaviour outside this playground, there are small children here', screamed a furious father at Malki Tesler, an Israeli artist staging a public intervention in the center of Tel Aviv's Meir Park, where she peacefully sat, physically blocking the playground's slide and preventing children from using the amenity. Tesler's site-specific work is an antagonistic act that evolved into a participatory event, thereby blurring the lines between public art, performance, and activism. Predicated on a determined refusal to play and a public presentation of a vulnerable body, this act instigated an incredibly violent reaction by children and chaperones alike, and therefore exposed the fragility of the so-called Israeli social bond and the exclusionary practices that sustain it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focusses on Fatma Shanan, one of the groundbreaking Druze women artists in Israel. The article presents an analysis of four of the artist's self-portraits, made between the years 2010–2017, relating to Shanan's work as an emotional process. The authors examine how the artist relates to the complexity of her experience as a woman and as an artist active within the patriarchal Druze community and as a woman artist from an ethnic minority acting in the Israeli Western-oriented artworld. The article looks at her struggle through her intersectional experience and studies the strategies of action she has used in this struggle, focusing on the artist undergoing process of transformation from being a young student and artist (functioning under this multiple oppression) to her identification of herself as an individual artist and a pioneering feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

João Delgado’s poetry first appeared as an anthology of translated poetry in He’arat Shulaym Issue 1, published in November 2001 in Jerusalem by the artist collective Sala-Manca. The entire issue was devoted to João Delgado. Delgado was a Portuguese-Argentinean poet, born in Lisbon circa 1920 (or not), who left Portugal as a political refugee for Buenos Aires. He disappeared in 1976 during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Since 1976, there has been no trace of his fate, although new fragments of his work are constantly being discovered, translated, and published by the Sala-Manca group. There is no evidence of any originals of his work. Literary critics in Israel praised Delgado’s poetry and art and even identified previously unknown relationships to poets and artists from the European avantgarde. In Sala-Manca’s artistic work, dating back two decades, João Delgado and his heteronyms would have a central role and focus, blurring the boundaries of the group, blurring the fictional with the “real”, and proposing a subjectivity that embraces multiplicity and dispersion. Translating his poetry into Hebrew, a foreign language (to Delgado), and bringing it into print for the first time in neither its original language nor the cultural context in which it was created may be seen as a kind of de-contextualization of the poet’s poetry, since Delgado always kept himself and his oeuvre connected to the immediate surroundings where it was produced. On the other hand, perhaps it is actually this possibility—to “become only in translation”—that is one of the outstanding characteristics of Delgado’s poetry, emblematic of its linguistic and conceptual elasticity. This paper examines João Delgado’s poetic work in relation to Sala-Manca’s artistic work and the way in which both Sala-Manca and Delgado create a “system of life” by being heteronyms of one another, allowing for a multiplicity of identities, and stressing the relation to Others.

In its political ideology, large sectors of Israeli society hold the belief that only people who share its ethnocratic values can share the same hygiene identity with it, reflecting its self-perception as a pure national subject. This is the context in which scatological works based on radical materialism and ethical critique first appeared in Israeli performance and video art at the turn of the twenty-first century. The artworks under discussion seek to consider humankind as machines that produce waste, with an emphasis on the excess waste that separates those who are excluded from the dominant Israeli-nationalist-Zionist view or discourse. Some artists employ excrement as a tool to degrade power structures, while others see it as a source of creativity and an alternative way of material and ethical life. Performing feces, or being shit, constitutes a position of creation, observation, and being to which we should pay particular attention at this moment in time.

The article focuses on two parafictional figures created by Israeli artists at about the same time in the early 2000s: Oreet Ashery’s Marcus Fisher and Roee Rosen’s Justine Frank. Through a close reading of these case studies, I examine the phenomenon of parafictional characters as extreme cases of voice appropriation. Against the background of rising international concern with cultural appropriation, and of the Israeli sociopolitical context characterized by a multiplicity of often conflicting identities, I argue that such appropriation is, in fact, a basic aesthetic procedure. Using Hannah Arendt’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic judgment as political judgment, and her articulation of an “enlarged mentality” as necessary for both aesthetic and political thinking, the article demonstrates how the ability to imagine a position different from your own is inherent for aesthetic representation as well as reception.

Aram Gershuni is an Israeli artist specialising in realistic and hyper-realistic painting, whose work differs radically from the mainstream of Israeli art and can most distinctly be characterised as 'mimesis', a term that is generally associated with traditional western art. Though Gershuni's still life images may seem at first sight trivial and banal, it is their very banality and mimetic appearance that are significant, reflecting profound and disputed issues in Israeli culture. This article explores Gershuni's still life paintings and offers several perspectives for their interpretation. The analysis is based on textual sources, mostly Classical, that reflect Gershuni's approach and affinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the artwork of Israeli artist, Rachel Nemesh, a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor. The assemblage to be discussed was exhibited in her solo exhibition, One Flesh, in 2020. The corpus analysis will be divided into four themes: (a) The Big Mother – works describing the elderly mother of Nemesh in a monumental manner; (b) Pieta versions – works focusing on bodily scenes of mother and daughter closely tangled; (c) Body-Parts: works showing randomly detached body organs; (d) Domestic Space – the artist's mother in her home. The study will be framed by two main fields: art centering on the Holocaust and feminist ideas focusing on mother-daughter relationships. Theoretical and visual examination will be enhanced by interviews with the artist aiming at profoundly decoding her artwork, claimed to resonate a feminine artistic language. An attempt to formulate an original interpretation of Holocaust Second-Generation's art, combined with a feminist point of view, will be made here. Rachel Nemesh's artwork is being investigated here for the very first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ecologically-inflected conceptions of home and belonging through a detailed study of Invasive Species (2017), an immersive media installation by emerging artist Emi Sfard. The installation comprises two interactive video works created with the help of 3D computer programs that can be updated in real time. Both works relate in different ways to Israeli landscape imaginaries, and examine the hidden relations between human and non-human "border crossers" that contribute to the way in which the national contours of the state of Israel are sustained, on material, aesthetic and conceptual levels. As I will argue, the installation's critical edge resides in part in its refusal to remain within the picture plane, implicating spectators in the depicted images through gaming technologies, and so interspersing questions of national boundaries with those of the borders of the gallery space [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The identity of Jewish-Israeli men of Ethiopian descent has undergone deep-seated changes in the last decade, as evident in visual representations created by contemporary black artists living in Israel. In recent years, a new generation of Ethiopian-Israeli artists has revitalized local art and engendered deep changes in discourse and public life. Ethiopian-Israelis, who comprise less than two percent of the total Jewish population in the country, suffers multiple forms of oppression, especially due to their religious status and given that their visibility—as black Jews—stands out in a society that is predominantly white. This article draws links between events of the past decade and the images of men produced by these artists. It argues that the political awareness of Jewish-Ethiopians artists, generated by long-term social activism as well as police violence against their community, has greatly impacted their artistic production, broadened its diversity, and contributed a wealth of artworks to Israeli culture as a whole. Using intersectional analysis and drawing on theories from gender, migration and cultural studies, the article aims to produce a nuanced understanding of black Jewish masculinity in the ethno-national context of the state of Israel.

This article presents an interpretation of the works by the Israeli–Druze photographer Amira Ziyan, focusing on a series of photographs from 2017. These portray reenactments of actions identified with traditional roles of women in Druze society, such as cooking and cleaning. Employing a unique visual language and choice of form and content, the artist depicts a confrontation between a clear set of rigid and traditional boundaries and values and a contemporary, post-modern reality in which these boundaries and values are blurred. The interpretive reading proposed here describes a synergy between visual codes of minorities and accepted visual codes of their surrounding pervasive culture in contemporary Israel. Ziyan’s work offers a glimpse into visual codes of “otherness” that express the inner world of an artist who grew up on the margins of society but strove to be accepted as an essential part of its main artistic current. Focusing on this perspective contributes to ongoing discourse regarding contradictions inherent in Israeli society and identity.

This article addresses a body of works by the video artist Ruth Patir, in which Israeli womanhood in the 2020s is interrogated through Iron Age female statuettes, known as Judean Pillar Figurines. By means of motion capture technology and 3D animation, Patir features contemporary Israeli women uncannily moving and speaking through the bodies of millennium-old female figurines, whose history and function are still under debate. In Petah Tikva (2020), Patir situates these hybrid figures in a modern IVF clinic, offering a biopolitical perspective on Israeli society’s compelling maternal impulse. Marry Fuck Kill (2019), in turn, ponders Israeli women’s legitimation of their femininity, across the generational gap between the artist and her mother, here cast in the role of an imposing Iron Age figurine. The paper addresses Patir’s work in both biopolitical and phenomenological terms, arguing that the sensual appeal of the archaeological objects often undermines the videos’ political critique.

This article explores ecologically-inflected conceptions of home and belonging through a detailed study of Invasive Species (2017), an immersive media installation by emerging artist Emi Sfard. The installation comprises two interactive video works created with the help of 3D computer programs that can be updated in real time. Both works relate in different ways to Israeli landscape imaginaries, and examine the hidden relations between human and non-human “border crossers” that contribute to the way in which the national contours of the state of Israel are sustained, on material, aesthetic and conceptual levels. As I will argue, the installation’s critical edge resides in part in its refusal to remain within the picture plane, implicating spectators in the depicted images through gaming technologies, and so interspersing questions of national boundaries with those of the borders of the gallery space

The project A Tale of a Woman and a Robe , initiated and produced by Israeli Jewish Orthodox video artist Nurit Jacobs Yinon in 2013, served to generate activism aimed at bringing about reform, in a particularly powerful case of feminist activism in contemporary Israeli art. This article explores the reception of the project and its critique of the Israeli patriarchal rabbinical court in the ritual immersion ceremony of female converts before three male judges. By studying the reception of the project within Jewish Orthodox communities and analyzing it in light of activist strategies utilized in Israeli Orthodox feminism, Sperber demonstrates how the artist seeks real social engagement, reaching beyond the walls of the museum or the gallery to generate a critical discourse that has the power to foment real change in the social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the works of Israeli woman artist Lilian Weisberger, who creates girlhood images that look naive at first glance but are nonetheless multilayered and radical. This examination of Weisberger's girlhood images is done here for the first time. Applying the bricolage methodology, the investigation of her artwork is based on a visual analysis, in-depth interviews with Weisberger, and feminist theories relevant to girlhood studies combined with several concepts from the field of psychology. Three series are discussed: the dark-gloomy images, bodiless images, and the group of super-girls and defiant ones. These images represent two substantial parts of the girl's soul-vulnerability versus intensity-while metaphorically materializing a feminist call for authenticity and wholeness of the girl, and eventually the woman. Weisberger's art embodies a quest for liberating an inner voice through creation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nechama Golan (b. 1947), is one of the best-known Jewish Orthodox feminist artists in Israel. This article deals with the reception of her most prominent and poignant work You Shall Walk in Virtuous Ways (1999–2011) – a high block-heeled sandal covered with Xerox copies of a Jewish sacred text. The article expands the study of reception by showing how the study of a work's reception within different cultural spheres can clarify the processes of meaning-making of the work. By shedding light on feminist art that addresses religious issues, the article demonstrates that art, religion, feminism and critical thinking are not as antithetical as some had claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand performance art of the past is to grapple with the fact that this art was designed to be lost. That is to say, it purposefully aspired to the condition of the lost work of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on ritual and landscape with oak grove as a place of commemoration and William Thomson, who, in his book "The Land and the Book" described his impressions as he travelled throughout the Ottoman Empire. It mentions exhibition and symposium about the sculptor Itzhak Danziger which examine the ideological connection between the two sites. It also mentions history of Israeli art, and a quintessential visual expression of resurrected Hebrew culture.

The feminist art movement of Jewish religious women in the United States and Israel emerged at the end of the 1990s. This article examines Jewish feminist art being created in Israel—a country in which legislation has empowered Jewish Orthodox institutions with sole control over the personal status of its Jewish citizens. Through an examination of works by four Orthodox Jewish Israeli women artists, I demonstrate how they have formulated a broad, radical critique of the rabbinical institutions that govern the female body, particularly regarding menstruation, conversion, and modesty—topics that have bearing on their identity as women, Jews in general, and Orthodox Jews in particular. Considering the exclusion of women from spiritual leadership roles within the Orthodox Jewish world, I underscore the importance of the art world as an alternative field of action through which religious feminists can make themselves heard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the art of Alina Rome Cohen, a woman artist from the former Soviet Union who immigrated to Israel. Her glass sculptures highlight her hyphenated, multilayered, and dynamic identity, illustrating identity construction processes of migrant women under conditions of uprooting and re-grounding in the globalized era of transnationalism. The discussion feeds from theories influenced by “the material turn”, suggesting that artifacts “speak”. I will therefore argue that the material—glass—is involved in the active discussion and negotiation of power relations within society. Framed through Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art, first introduced in his book titled Art and Agency from 1998, this approach proposes a horizon of agency for the artworks themselves, which function in the world alongside other actants operating in the field, such as human beings. This article will analyze Rom Chohen’s artworks and will be informed by cultural theories from migration studies and gender studies, in order to ask new questions about the dynamics of the exclusion and inclusion of migrants under the ethno-national state of Israel, while offering alternative ways by which to think of concepts such as memory and time, as past and present are brought to a simultaneity.

How do representations of living rooms, domestic artifacts, and family gaze articulate "local home images" in contemporary Israeli art? The article examines comparatively the way artists from different ethnic backgrounds assume the "inside agent" role toward their own cultural identity or the "outside agent" role in the home of the "Other". Both inside and outside have adopted ethnographic or pseudo-ethnographic strategies in the wake of the "ethnographic turn" of contemporary art and visual culture. These comparative perspectives do not converge into one new type of Israeliness. Images of various and different domestic environments offer a conflicted view of what "feeling at home" means, questioning the role of one who produces the "family gaze", the homely image itself, and where and to whom these images are exhibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the 1970s, the ideologies that emphasized the centrality of the rootedness, localness and ancient Hebrew origins of ceramics were promoted by curators. They had access both to the broader field of Israeli art and to financial resources. They favoured art that reflected the process of its creation and demonstrated temporality and expressiveness, and linked these qualities to the concept of 'Israeli authenticity', which, in their mind, embraced both intuitiveness and the absence of self-limitations. I argue that other ideologies that encouraged similar styles in Israeli ceramics, influenced by trends in international ceramics, were neglected and eventually excluded from the dominant narrative on the history of Israeli ceramics. While there were other ideologies that encouraged new styles in Israeli ceramics at the time, the search for localism became the central narrative on Israeli ceramics, leaving the next generation of makers and writers with a reduced legacy to react to and debate with. This article proposes a pluralistic perspective on the history of Israeli ceramics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines images of wild flowers in Israeli visual culture from the period of pre-state Israel until the present day. These images have served as "cultural objects" that have helped construct a national identity. They have appeared in Hebrew publications, stamps, banknotes, and artworks. Arguing that the choice of botanical art is a political statement, this article shows the complex attitudes embodied in contemporary wild flower images—both thematic and stylistic—in which the artists negotiate their multifaceted relationship with the Land of Israel as a troubled territory. The images created by Israeli-Jewish artists share a twofold significance: they stand as naïve memories of Israel's early years and, at the same time, they embody the reality of conflict implied in the idea of sharing the Land with the Israeli Arabs. The methodology of this article is interdisciplinary, as it integrates an analysis of visual images with the use of interviews and the explication of texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the emergence and development of performative art practices in Israel in the 1960s-1970s. Topics discussed include spread of the ideological and aesthetic wings of the Ofakim Hadashim painters over Israeli art through the 1950s and most of the 1960s, manifestations of conceptual art which gained more prominence in the art historiography of that period, and concept of body art and of the self as a source for artistic creation in the Israeli art discourse.

My exploration of works by the Israel-based artist Dina Shenhav, such as City (2000), Game Over (2001), Dog (2005), End of the Forest (2008), Crystal (2008), and Rest (2008), aspires to develop a critical reading of visual artwork associated with literary texts. This essay suggests a reading of Dina Shenhav's art as an "autobiographical narrative in pictorial terms" that highlights the tensions derived from the interplay between different modes of representation—word and image, poetic and visual—in the past and the present, in Europe and in the Middle East, in German and in Hebrew. Interacting and corresponding with aesthetic theories by Walter Benjamin, as well as with concepts in the fields of art (Dürer, Kiefer) and poetics (Sebald, Yehoshua, Yeshurun), I intend to show how Shenhav shapes a visual poetics of catastrophe in her coming to terms with a private and collective traumatic past that is inseparable from bearing witness to an ongoing political present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses an intriguing intergenerational encounter between Micha Ullman (b. Tel Aviv 1939), one of Israel’s most prominent senior artists, and Ronen Sharabani (b. Tel Aviv 1974), a young media artist. The two artists’ otherwise divergent practices converge in their use of sand and red earth as their primary media. The paper brings Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics and Jill Bennett’s phenomenological approach to trauma-related art to bear on Ullman’s fragile earth installations and perforated sand tables, and on Sharabani’s projections of Virtual Reality onto sand. Also addressed is Sharabani’s series Vitual Territories (2019), in which digitally manipulated views from Google Earth probe geographical sites that resonate with migratory histories. The paper traces two main trajectories upon which the oeuvres of Ullman and Sharabani interface. The first category, “treacherous sands”, relates to installations involving sand tables and other containers of soil. In turn, the category of “fragile traces” addresses installations that feature various architectural ground plans modeled in sand. In these installations, sand is the quintessential terra infirma. At the same time, however, the paper proposes that through the haptic appeal of the medium of sand, these installations counter the pervasive anxiety of shifting ground with an augmented sense of bodily presence.

This article explores Jerusalem-based art practice from the 1930s to the 1960s, focusing particularly on the German immigrant artists that dominated this field in that period. I describe the distinct aesthetics of this art and explain its role in the Zionist nation-building project. Although Jerusalem’s art scene participated significantly in creating a Jewish−Israeli national identity, it has been accorded little or no place in the canon of national art. Adopting a historiographic approach, I focus on the artist Mordecai Ardon and the activities of the New Bezalel School and the Jerusalem Artists Society. Examining texts and artworks associated with these institutions through the prism of migratory aesthetics, I claim that the art made by Jerusalem’s artists was rooted in their diasporic identities as East or Central European Jews, some German-born, others having settled in Germany as children or young adults. These diasporic identities were formed through their everyday lives as members of a Jewish diaspora in a host country—whether that be the Russian Empire, Poland, or Germany. Under their arrival in Palestine, however, the diasporic Jewish identities of these immigrants (many of whom were not initially Zionists) clashed with the Zionist−Jewish identity that was hegemonic in the nascent field of Israeli art. Ultimately, this friction would exclude the immigrants’ art from being inducted into the national art canon. This is misrepresentative, for, in reality, these artists greatly influenced the Zionist nation-building project. Despite participating in a number of key Zionist endeavours—whether that of establishing practical professions or cementing the young nation’s collective consciousness through graphic propaganda—they were marginalized in the artistic field. This exclusion, I claim, is rooted in the dynamics of canon formation in modern Western art, the canon of Israeli national art being one instance of these wider trends. Diasporic imagery could not be admitted into the Israeli canon because that canon was intrinsically connected with modern nationalism.

Initiation or rites of passage in the ancient world constituted a highly meaningful experience and were intended to delineate the transition from childhood to adult status, with the sacred initiation meant to promise a merging with the divine. The argument at the heart of this research is that features of initiation and of the ancient Dionysian rituals can be found in works by Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) and Anisa Ashkar (b. 1979), as metaphors of contemporary initiation in relation to the establishment of the Israeli nation and the fate of the Arab inhabitants following the Nakba (“disaster” in Arabic), the exodus of the Palestinian and Arab dwellers after the establishment of the Israeli State in 1948. This article employs ancient texts and visual references as well as contemporary thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hitlerwelle, Führerboom, Hitlernostalgie in the German language; in Hebrew there is the famous La'Hit-Ler ( Hitler-Schlager) coined by Israeli poet David Avidan, or what Professor Moshe Zuckermann has just recently called Hitleriada (a combination between Hitler and Olympiad): all phrases share the wish to describe the great interest that people often (re-)find in the figure of the Nazi Führer. And this interest usually emerges in waves. During the 1990s, Israeli art showed an obsessive preoccupation with the figure of Hitler that lasted around a decade and is considered to be a turning point with respect to the ways the Holocaust is represented among Israeli-Jewish artists. By focusing on the work of Israeli artist Boaz Arad, Marcel Marcel (2000), which ended this decade, in comparison to the work of German artist Rudolf Herz, ZUGZWANG (1995), this essay wishes to re-think the recruiting of the image of Hitler in Israeli art, in order to introduce the advantages of transnationalism and a comparative approach to the local art discourse with respect to Holocaust related imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper focuses on the art of three women artists - Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi and Fatma Shanan. The research paper focuses on the work of three women artists who are 'double-minority'--Fatima Abu-Roomi, Samah Shihadi, and Fatma Shanan. Their 'double-minority' status comes from being Arab women, raised in patriarchal communities as Muslims (Abu-Roomi and Shihadi), or Druze (Shanan), who live and work among a Jewish majority in the Western-based environment of Israel. The objectives of this research are to point out the significance of their art as an innovative and unique voice within the Israeli art scene that reflect the conditions of young Arab women living in Israel today. Through analysis of their art, the research will aim to explore the artistic strategies, topics, and styles, as a means of negotiating their identity as a 'double-minority'. A feminist reading of the artwork will be followed by another theoretical point of view from the psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott who coined the term "potential space". In different "potential spaces", the artists question cultural boundaries, national issues of colonialism, and gender roles. Choosing art as an ideological site, as well as a practical platform, allows them to widely investigate their identity in a complex minority situation and formulate a path for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leading up to the 2014 festival of Sukkot, the Sala-Manca Artists' Group, directors of the Mamuta Art and Media Centre at Hansen House, decided to create a public sukkah on the Hansen grounds as a temporary dwelling for its activities during the holiday. Rather than constructing an extravagant or innovatively designed sukkah, Sala-Manca, together with Itamar Mendes-Flohr and Yeshayahu Rabinowitz, chose to delve into the sukkah's charged meaning in the Israeli context and to highlight the temporary nature of the structure and its associations with exile, thus evoking connotations related not only to Jewish history but also to the current Israeli context and proposing a contemporary reading of the sukkah, both as a concrete object and as a symbol. A structure from the Jahalin Bedouin community, refugees from the Negev (Israel) on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, is therefore purchased, dismantled, and reassembled on the grounds of the Hansen House. This article discusses The Eternal Sukkah project in its historic, political, and cultural context, and in the context of the history of Israeli art. I deal with the relations between the Jewish festival of Sukkot, Bedouin architecture, and Israeli ethno-politics, as expressed in this project in which I was also involved as artist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what sense can works of art constitute a community? How can an artist's particular subject position participate in a social connection established by art? Taking issue with current claims that community precedes works of art and determines them ideologically, the article argues that a community is what might be generated by works of art and the subject position behind them. Since my argument revolves around the tension between the social and subjective aspects of works of art, the article begins by returning to two major articulations of the decline of the subjective in Western art. It then examines two canonical essays about Israeli art that embody the tension between subjectivity and the constitution of a community. The solution I offer is based on Freud's notion of social bonds and their relation to the unconscious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article asks why the Israeli theatre’s ‘voicing hegemony’ practices endure despite a critical public debate that favors cultural pluralism. Ethnographies at two central repertory theatres elicit the meanings of the theatre’s ‘back-to-the past’ institutional habitus, as revealed in observations and in-depth interviews with actors, and disclose artistic dispositions that bolster veteran actors’ stature in the theatre and Israeli art generally. Analysis of the findings links professional capital with the twilight of an artist’s theatrical career. One conclusion connects the theatrical habitus with justification of Israel’s Zionist ideology. Theoretically, the article illuminates the historical component of the Bourdieuian concept of habitus. The duplication of this component in the back-to-the-past habitus inheres to mythification processes and makes the theatrical habitus relatively resilient to social changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The union of art and politics has endured down the centuries, looking to the past, through memory, and to the future, through desire. The memory of what was or could have been provides a utopia to be celebrated or mourned, and since 1948 Palestinian and Israeli art has reflected on loss and gain, sacrifice and security, and presence and absence in the land. Contemporary Palestinian and Israeli art has converged, seeking peace, critical reflection and an acknowledgement of the impact of the years of unrest that has been borne by both sides, while technology has afforded a means to trace heterotopias in the spaces between possession and dispossession. Drawing on Luisa Passerini, Michel Foucault and Maurice Halbwachs, this article maps the land, utopia and heterotopias in Israeli and Palestinian artistic practices, and explores the performativity of silence, loss and remembrance through the works of Sliman Mansour, Reuven Rubin, Tamam al-Akhal and Yael Bartana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]