Three Conversations – A Feminine Dialogue

The exhibition “3 Conversations – A Female Dialogue” was created between six women, three Arab and three Jewish,and explores a female approach to encounter, conversation, dialogue, and engagement with artistic creation within busy lives filled with many roles. Since each artist comes from a different culture, background, and environment, a genuine possibility for a fascinating dialogue emerges. The artists were paired according to their artistic practices. Three pairs of women artists were formed—one artist from Arab society and one from Jewish society in each pair. Each pair created a conversation in a different way: one chose to work on a shared canvas, another worked in a space in which each artist responded to the other, and the third chose to create a single work from two bodies of work. Through this conversation they express perspectives on the art world and on the world of women in art. For the artists, this was a first experience both of collaborative work and of working together with an artist from another society.

Each was asked to invite a new colleague into her intimate creative space

and to set out on a path whose outcome was unknown.

What did these six women do? Did they walk on eggshells? Did they remain within the cautious space of pleasantness? Did they remove the mask of politeness? Did they encounter what was essential in one another?

They came wanting to get to know one another, understanding that the connection itself existed because of their differences.

At the end of the day, each encountered a woman before her

and in a female language they spoke art

The exhibition is on view from May 20 to June 16 and is open Sunday–Thursday, 8:00–16:00.

At the Peace Gallery, Givat Haviva Arts Center.

Arts Center telephone:04-6309262

3 Conversations. Dialogue. Female dialogue. Female dialogue between artists. Female dialogue between artists from different cultures and societies.

What happens when dialogue takes place between women? Is it different? And if it is different, can we meet within it differently?

A masculine dialogue (which can also take place between women) is conducted face to face, eye to eye.

An argument is raised and substantiated, and the other side refutes or confirms it—what is known as negotiation.

A female mode of dialogue creates a circle around two people who draw closer and listen.

Female discourse is connected to being—to being even when another woman is beside you.

Not in opposition, not instead. Me too. You too.

In a female dialogue there is no need to stop everything and devote oneself to negotiation; the conversation is multilayered—emerging from within and while things are happening, despite and nevertheless, simultaneously, sometimes even beyond time. Such communication awakens spaces in which unity can exist.

The dialogue here takes place in a charged location within our living space in Israel,

where artists from the same country arrive with different identities.

All these layers exist within them, as women and creators with a need to make themselves heard.

“3 Conversations” is an exhibition that enabled six artists to engage in a dialogue that breaks out of routine.

Each was asked to invite a new colleague into her intimate creative space

and to set out on a path whose outcome was unknown.

The project took place under “laboratory” conditions: a defined period of six weeks and a “partnership” with an assigned partner, matched according to a common denominator in the artistic sphere—similar subject matter, shared techniques, or comparable choices of space, material, or form. The voices in the artistic dialogue addressed home, marriage, earth, body, roots, and place.

Within the space, within the layers of time, within the body

of a woman.

Is it natural for art to be created “together”? Is artistic creation dependent on ego, and can that ego step aside when another impulse leads the way? Is a genuine conversation taking place here? What are the components of an artistic and female artistic conversation? What happens to personal, social, cultural, and political identity in such a conversation? The encounter sharpens and refines identities; it can also reinforce them or dissolve them. Does identity remain as it was? Does it change?

What did these six women do? Did they walk on eggshells? Did they remain within the cautious space of pleasantness? Did they remove the mask of politeness? Did they encounter what was essential in one another?

They came wanting to get to know one another, understanding that the connection itself existed because of their differences.

At the end of the day, each encountered a woman before her

and in a female language they spoke art

and in the language of art they spoke about femininity.

Two painters and illustrators who work intuitively, with their inner worlds expressed through almost surrealist imagery. Both live along Route 65, geographically close yet culturally far apart. Their first meeting was restrained, taking place in the neutral workspace of the studio at the Givat Haviva Arts Center. They allowed themselves to draw closer, and each responded in her work to the imagery of the other.

The collaborative work began with two works by Sondos made using a delicate etching technique and featuring figures from the world of manga, Japanese comics that also developed in the West and are often characterized by violent content. The use of a highly traditional technique for manga figures originating in a distant culture that does not belong here creates tension. The tension between content and technique echoes the tension between Sondos herself and her subject matter. In the collaborative work Two Sondos, two central figures appear: one is Sondos and the other is Nora wearing a veil—a hijab. Both sit on plastic chairs in a neutral zone, in a landscape combining references from two worlds, inner and outer, along the continuum between Talmei Elazar and Umm al-Fahm.

The Kiss, ink on paper, a work created by Nora in 2010, concludes the collaborative process in an intimate place. This work also addresses doubling, but unlike the painting they created together, in which the figures remain somewhat distant, in The Kiss the figures merge into a single figure; their facial features blend and their original identities become blurred.

Already in their first meeting, the artists discovered that they were dealing with the same subjects, but their interpretations, material choices, forms of expression, and approaches were opposite.

Dana is a textile artist who works with earth-based materials. Her working process begins like a materials laboratory: she tests techniques and discovers through peeling, coloring, and erasing, and in this way the idea takes shape. Nardina is a multidisciplinary artist who begins with an idea and, after extensive research, starts engaging with the material. The subject of marriage emerged in their shared dialogue, and each artist’s personal perspective gave rise to a dialogue between two bodies of work.

In the work Seam Line, a photograph of a female nude against a background of Arabic text examines the place of a young virgin woman before marriage. The text is the story of Little Red Riding Hood, told to girls to warn them about the “big bad wolf.” The choice of an Arab model expresses a personal perspective; the body is shown without a face, an imperfect body in which every woman can find herself. The Dress Laid on the Ground, a work Dana created in 2010 and which is brought back to life, presents an image of a dress emptied of the body, placed on the earth and entering into dialogue with the nude figure. The dress is simple and murky, colored using a pouring technique. Printed on it is a map of no country and every country.

Another work displayed in the space is Arka, using a technique of printing a duplicated photograph. The choice of a circular format arose from the gaze of a woman lowering her eyes toward the hem of her dress, toward its contour. The image on the surface is a tree that was colored, worked, sanded, printed, and peeled again and again. In this tree the crowns meet and create a synergistic network, a “new brain,” in which the roots are free to grow and move.

In the fourth, collaborative work presented by the artists, I Am Not the One, one chooses an Arabic text warning about menstruation, an encoded tale, while the other writes Hebrew texts from the early period of Jewish immigration on a tallit. The joining of the texts—an act fundamentally violent even within the artistic space—succeeds here in creating harmony, a new language of multiplicity that becomes a texture.

The artists began with a dialogue taking place in the exhibition space: one artist would come to work, and the second would arrive at another time to respond. Toward the end of the project they met for a period of working together, and felt that their shared presence allowed the process to mature into a single work. Amira and Ayelet use similar materials in their work; both are driven by an inner aesthetic. Amira works in relation to space and in large formats, while Ayelet works in small and even miniature formats. Through their meetings and exchange, each examines the other’s format and herself in relation to it.

Amira Fudi is a multidisciplinary artist who works with materials taken from a “masculine world,” creating works that demand physical effort. The materials she chooses are ready-mades with a history—parts of furniture from which she creates new worlds. She examines form and functional use as they are transformed and acquire new meaning, or at least attempt to receive a second chance. She explores the forces struggling between inside and outside, functionality and non-functionality, like the struggle between her own different parts, born of her multiple roles as a woman, mother, and artist. Each time, one part takes center stage while another is pushed aside.

Ayelet Gad comes from the world of illustration. In recent years she has worked with recycled materials and in small formats, repeatedly addressing the subject of home: its perfect image above ground versus what lies beneath the surface—its roots—which she often works on, wounds, and scratches like scars left on a body.

In the collaborative installation Inside and Outside (combining installation, painting, and sculpture), they speak about a home that falls apart, freezes, and is rebuilt. Amira places pieces of furniture taken from a domestic interior and uses them to construct an outline, a surface, an interior or exterior wall of a house. She leaves a window open but seals its sides with concrete. The view seen through the window is a work by Ayelet—an endless longing for home, for something distant. A dream among the fragments, a model of a complete house that is nevertheless wounded and cracked, like the place in which we live.

The Chair is a collaborative work presenting an old, broken piece of domestic furniture whose functional purpose is sitting. The backrest created for it is almost two-dimensional, made of wire that gives the sense of something about to fall, making it impossible to lean against. The chair continues toward the ground and sends out root-like extensions intended to anchor it in the earth, but they too are made of wire and are not connected to it.

In this female dialogue, the chair ultimately chooses to turn toward the aesthetic and poetic, leaving functionality behind—perhaps parting from it and gaining a moment of respite.