I Am Her
Buthina Abu Milhem - Sohad Deeb - Doaa Badran - Rahmi Hamzi
Why?
This is the second exhibition, part two of
three exhibitions to be presented during one year (2019-2020) at
the Peace Gallery - Givat Haviva, dealing
with the unequal positioning of women in Israel even in this post-postmodern
period.
The first exhibition,
"I am the Laboring Art", presented the artistic path of two female
artists from the kibbutz movement.
Gender inequality and
artistic inequality were also present in the kibbutz society in Israel. Despite
the fact that it was a society that championed the value of equality, in
practice this did not materialize in the aspects of gender and art. Part 3 will
be presented at the exhibition planned for early 2020, which will focus on the
issue of the Femicide in Israel.
I Am Her presents a penetrating
x-ray of four female artists who are members of the Arab-Palestinian society in
Israel, examining the condition and the positioning of women in that society,
as well as their situation in Israel in general and in other Muslim societies
in the world. It brings a multi-dimensional
statement both locally and
globally. The exhibition was created out of an accompanying perception of the
wide-ranging repercussions of the Me Too campaign in the world and in Israel,
and following a year in which over twenty women were murdered in Israel, 192
women over the past decade.
Buthina Abu Milhem, Sohad
Deeb, Rahmi Hamzi and Doaa Badran, each present a personal and blazing angle.
The totality of their views together presents a multi-generational, complex and
complementary view that, in developmental observation, also shows a changing
vision.
Buthina Abu Milhem
Abu Milhem, who has been
active in the artistic arena for a considerable time, brings a semi-traditional
perspective that expresses woman and her role as the keeper of Palestinian
culture, memory and pain through the presence of traditional sewing techniques
of Palestinian embroidery, which has become the symbol of feminine culture and
resistance. Through artistic moves she creates a garment that cannot be
worn, which is frozen in time. Through feminine actions of mediation and
connection, between past and present, authentic and modern, art and craft,
"shirts" are sewn and a rural tradition and culture is woven into a
present where the needles are stuck and the threads remain unraveled in the
air.
"The surface of Arab
fabric is her world, and what is embroidered and embedded in it is her identity
card and the resonance of her identity" (Haim Maor) as a woman and as a
society. The needle sews and connects but also stabs and multiplies and when
many needles are stuck, it hurts.
Milhem shows feminine
virtuoso flexibility that had become the legacy of the Palestinian woman. The
one that was confined within the boundaries of her home and made it into her
kingdom. Her materials are spices from the kitchen (such as coffee), embroidery
threads, needles, Arabic cotton fabric, wax and more.
She moves easily in her
art among the familiar materials that every Palestinian woman has in her home.
Milhem emerges from tradition through the power of the traditional woman as an
important axis in the preservation, memory and encryption of the story of the
Palestinian people, its culture and its history, through the embroidery made in
so many homes as a rare manuscript of history.
In the series from 'The Needle Vanquished the
Tailor', the garment is stretched
on canvas, the background becomes black, the proverbs and the Arabic language
give way to the main presence of the abstract signifier, signified, line and
fabric. A central meaning is the changing opening of the garment: with arms
that are open and accepting or closed and folded, with hope of connection or a
sense of being crucified.
Pride and breaking,
language and message, preservation and the freezing of time, are sewn in the
passage from craft to art: the garment becomes both object and piece of art.
The garment speaks of the body in its absence, in a critical act of
objectification.
Buthina presents us with a
strong female model that draws its strength from the past and its roots,
embracing a feminine identity, family, culture and tradition. Although it works
in the present, in the expanses of displacement and detachment, it maintains an
upright gaze into the future.
Sohad Deeb
Abu Milhem and Deeb have
been collaborating for a long time. Both come from the same village (Ar'ara)
and have many overlapping points, but the position of Deeb, who is younger from
Abu Milhem by almost a decade, is different in the materials of fire and the
bricks she uses to construct her statement.
She speaks in a direct and
liberated language, through the preoccupation with the woman's body and her
re-appropriation of it against the artistic-colonialist actions of the
18th-century French artist Ingres, in his work "The Turkish Bath," in
which he paints the Oriental woman as a Western woman, manifesting an erotic
freedom of expression beyond what was customary in Western women's nude
paintings at the time. Consistently and obsessively, Deeb captures and
deconstructs, cuts and weaves, writes ("virgin", "my
body"), covers and emphasizes in countless variations that are all
intended to regain the hold on the body of that woman and of the woman she is.
Like her partners in the
exhibition, Deeb operates in the space between painting and sculpture, using a
wide range of materials: from woman figures made of soil, preserved and frozen
in oil jars, through bags of spices and seeds, to acrylics in shades of red,
black and gold, on large surfaces that combine weaving, threads, ropes, and
men's ties. In the face of 18th century Western
perceptions and mostly of the society in which she lives, she speaks of her
full right to personal and feminine freedom over her body and desire, of her
personal – and other women's - choices of a partner and family life.
Sohad redefines the
boundaries of the woman she is, as well as the spaces of feminine privacy to
which women are entitled.
She also deals with the
obvious ability of the immediate social and cultural environment to invade
feminine privacy in a way that feels it is legitimate to appropriate
information and satisfy its curiosity.
The curious, unchallenged
space of penetration, in which masculinity asks, and even publicly, the woman
in Israeli society (both Jewish and Arab) why she has no children, why she is
not married… Is she a virgin? Or pregnant? In so doing, she speaks for many
women who wish to place the discourse elsewhere in the relationship between men
and women.
Rahmi Hamzi
Rahmi Hamzi (24), who lives
and works in Bir al-Maksur in northern Israel is a (relatively new) graduate of
the Art Department at Haifa University, who has already emerged as a promising
young artist who places her position on the female body, religious and sexual
motifs, nature, beauty and perfection. Hamzi shapes her works through aesthetic
tactics as she deconstructs and reconstructs organic forms of images with
botanical motifs on the canvas and in the sculptural space.
Her inspiration is erotic
plants and their flowers. When she enlarges the flowers of the plant she shows
it in its complete beauty and perfection, fully ready to be seen. "Flowers
are reproductive organs of the plant, they are natural and beautiful," she
says.
Women and flowers have
always been compared to each other with a variety of meanings (purity,
fertility, beauty) in a variety of fields (literature, art, poetry, etc.),
except a significant part of that is silenced in the world where Rahmi grew up.
She enriched her inner world on her own, through the many books she read
about femininity and body.
This was complemented by a thick layer of advanced feminist concepts that
she developed in her studies. Together, they accumulated into a gentle but
heavy mass.
Along with her great
delicacy, which appears to be her personal stamp, there is courage and
determination in the importance she attributes to her need, as an Arab woman to
speak of natural femininity and sexuality that are even more present as they
are silenced.
In her delicate craft-like
sculpture she thus creates ritual objects. They address the beautiful and
natural feminine and she calls them Sacred Organs. She repeatedly paints
herself in subtle, semi-abstract oil paintings, featuring multiple gazes and
directions of organic shapes of the female body, sometimes her own face,
sometimes enlarged parts of flora.
Doaa Badran
Like Hamzi, Badran is
another young artist who brings a strong, clear voice looking at the woman and
her free essence and great spirit through mythologies and connection to nature
– through which they express both her greatness and powerlessness (at the cost
she had had to pay during ages of patriarchy).
Badran, 26, from Haifa, a
graduate of the Art Department at Haifa University like Ramzi, follows the
transition between material and form in her work. Her drawings and sculptures
are in constant dialogue, connected but not uniform.
Badran's sculptures are
created by combining traditional motifs with everyday readymade objects.
Different materials
crystallize under her hands into an image that is always an image of a body, a
female body.
The building blocks of
femininity in Badran's work are mythology, tradition, and questions on the
essence of life. Her exploration of mythology begins with Damiana, the Mother
Goddess of whose blood the world was created, through sacred sexual priestesses
in the Babylonian culture who were perceived as saints.
She examines the feminine
role in the world, what is female holiness, and what is the role of humanity,
what is perfection. Through these questions she also asks about the world
itself from a feminine perspective: Should we give in order to receive in this
world? Should one ever be born?
Badran's body is wounded;
There is an amputation or damage that brings together material and shape. The
artist tends to the wound and thus it becomes an inherent part of the work. Who
injured and who was hurt? The artist or the material? An example is Umbilical
Cord, in which she works with steel wool. The process is deep, personal,
sometimes even therapeutic, but its power lies in the fact that it expresses
the essential, the mythological, as if examining and seeking to reach the core
definition of feminine essence.
Epilogue
It is not certain that the
four artists will be able to close a circle of one common statement, but this
is the quality of femininity, it does not need it.
It has the ability to create
complex statements that contain both and.
Together, they create a rich
tapestry of feminine wisdom that reflects strong and meaningful femininity both
in the traditional space and in the contemporary space. Still, it is a
femininity that is struggling for its right to exist in the world.
Anat Lidror, Curator.