Three Conversations – A Women’s Dialogue
Three conversations. A dialogue. A women’s dialogue. A dialogue between artists. A women’s dialogue between artists from a different society and culture.
What happens when the dialogue is between women? Is it different? And if it is, can it create a different kind of meeting?
A masculine dialogue, which can be held by women as well, is a face-to-face kind of dialogue. One brings up an argument, substantiates it, and then the other side refutes or confirms it. It is known as negotiation.
A women’s dialogue creates a circle around two people who get closer, listening.
The feminine discourse is related to being. By being even when there is another person nearby.
Not compared to, not instead of. Me too. You too.
In a women’s dialogue there is no need to stop everything and turn to negotiation; The conversation is multi-layered; Out of and during, in spite of and nevertheless, simultaneous, sometimes even beyond time. Such communication evokes places where unity can exist.
The dialogue here takes place in the charged space we inhabit, here in Israel.
It is attended by female artists from the same country but with a different identity.
And all the layers exist within them, in women who are artists, who have a need to express themselves.
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Three Conversations is an exhibition that allowed six female artists to hold a dialogue that breaks out of the ordinary. Each was asked to introduce a new colleague into her intimate creative space, and set off without knowing what would happen in the end.
The project took place under laboratory conditions for a specified time - 6 weeks - and in a 'partnership' with a given partner. The matching was made according to a common denominator in the artistic sphere: similar work contents, shared techniques or identical choices in space, material or form. The voices in the artistic discourse referred to the home, wedding, land, body, roots, place.
Inside the space, inside the layers of time, inside the body
of a woman.
Is it natural for art to be created “together”? Does the artistic work depend on ego, and can that ego put itself aside when another impulse paves the way? Is there a real conversation going on here? What are the components of artistic conversation and, specifically, feminine artistic conversation? What happens to personal, social, cultural, political identity in such a conversation? The encounter sharpens identities, polishes them; it can reinforce, but also dissolve. Does one’s identity remain as it is? Does it change?
What did these six women do? Did they walk on eggshells? Did they stay in the careful, pleasant space? Did they remove the mask of politeness? See the essence of each other?
They came wanting to get to know each other, realizing that the very connection is formed due to the difference.
At the end of the day, they met a woman
And in women’s language they spoke art
And in the language of art, they talked about women.
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Dialogue 1 - Sundus Laham and Nura Porat:
Two female illustrators, who work intuitively, with their inner world expressed in almost surrealistic illustrations. Both live next to Route 65, at a close geographical distance and a far cultural distance. Their first meeting was subdued, in the neutral work space of the studio at the Givat Haviva Art Center. They allowed themselves to get closer and each of them referred to the images of the other in their work.
The beginning of the collaboration was born from two works by Sundus done in a delicate engraving technique, featuring characters from the world of manga, Japanese comics that have also developed in the West and are often characterized by violent content. The use of a very traditional technique for manga characters coming from a distant culture, which does not belong here at all, creates tension. Like the tension between content and technique, the same tension exists between Sundus herself and her content. The joint work Two Sundus feature two central figures: one is the figure of Sundus, while the other is Nura, wearing a hijab. Both are sitting on plastic chairs in a neutral area, in a landscape that combines within it references from two content worlds: the inner and the outer, on the continuum between Talmei Elazar and Umm al-Fahm.
The Kiss, a work of ink on paper created by Nura in 2010, ends the joint process in an intimate place. This work also speaks of doubling, but unlike the painting they created together where the figures are distant in a certain way, in the work 'The Kiss' the two figures merge into one, their facial features merge and their original identity becomes blurred.
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Dialogue 2 - Nardeena Moghaizel Shammas and Dana Nitzani
Already in their first meeting, the artists discovered that they deal with the same subjects, but the interpretation, choices of material, expression and manner are contradictory. Dana, a textile artist, deals with earth materials. Her work processes begin like a laboratory of materials, she tests techniques, discovers a way of peeling, coloring, erasing, and this is how the idea takes shape. Nardeena, a multidisciplinary artist, first comes up with the idea and then begins to touch the material after extensive research. The subject of the wedding came up in the joint discussion, and the personal perception of each artist led to a dialogue between two bodies of work.
In the work A Seam Line, a photograph of a female nude on a background of Arabic text examines the place of a young woman, a virgin, before her wedding. The text is the story of Little Red Riding Hood, a cautionary tale for girls, warning them of the 'Bad Wolf'. The choice of an Arab model reflects a personal view; the presentation of a faceless body, an imperfect body, suggests that anyone can find herself in it. The dress placed on the ground, a work created by Dana in 2010 that comes to life, presents an image of a dress empty of a body, placed on the ground and corresponding with the naked figure. The dress is simple, dull, painted using the technique of spilling paint. A map is printed on it, the map of no country and every country.
Another work displayed in the space is Arca, using the printing technique of a reproduced photograph. The choice of a round format was born from the look of a woman who lowers her eyes to the hemline of her dress, to the outline. The image shown on the substrate is a tree that has been painted, processed and polished, printed and peeled again and again. In this tree, the tops meet and create a synergistic network, a 'new brain', in which the roots are free to grow and move.
In the fourth joint work presented by the artists, I Am Not, the first chooses a text in Arabic that warns against the female cycle, an encrypted legend, and the other writes Hebrew texts from the beginning of the era of Aliyah on a tallit. The connection between the texts, a fundamentally violent action even within the artistic space, manages to create harmony, a new language of multiplicity to the point of creating a texture.
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Dialogue 3 – Ayelet Gad and Amira Fode
The artists started the journey in a dialogue that takes place in the space, with one artist who comes to work and the other artist arriving at another time to respond. Towards the end of the project, they met for a joint stay and there they felt that this allowed the process to mature into one work. Amira and Ayelet use similar materials in their work; Both are motivated by internal aesthetics. Amira works in reference to space and in large formats, while Ayelet works in small to miniature formats. In their meeting and in their correspondence, they examine each other's format and themselves in this context.
Amira Fode, a multidisciplinary artist, deals with materials taken from the "male world", works that require physical effort. The materials she chooses to work with are ready-mades, with history, furniture parts, with which she creates new worlds. She observes formality and functional use that is processed and given a new meaning, or at least tries to get a second chance. She examines the forces of the struggle between inside and outside, functionality and lack of functionality, like that struggle between her different parts, which were born from her multiple female, maternal and artistic roles. Each time, a different part gets the stage and another part is pushed aside.
Ayelet Gad comes from the world of illustration. In recent years, she has been dealing with recycled materials, working in small formats and touching repeatedly on the subject of the home, with its perfect image, above the surface of the earth, and what is below the surface, the roots, which she usually treats, wounding and scratching them, like body scars that remain.
In the joint installation Interior and Exterior (a combination of techniques: installation, painting, sculpture) they speak of a house that breaks apart, freezes and is rebuilt. Amira places pieces of furniture taken from the interior of a house and rearranges them into an outline, a surface, a wall of a house inside or outside. She leaves a window open but seals the window panes with concrete. The view from the window is Ayelet's work, an endless longing for home, for something far away. A dream among the fragments, a model of a home that is whole but wounded and cracked like the place where we live.
The chair is a collaborative work that presents an old and broken piece of domestic furniture whose purpose is functional: seating. The support that is created for it is almost two-dimensional, made of wire that gives the feeling of something that is about to fall, so that you cannot lean on it. The chair continues into the ground and sends root extensions intended as anchors, but they are also made of wire and are not connected to the ground. Actually, in this women’s dialogue, the chair chooses to turn to the aesthetic and the poetic and leave functionality behind, perhaps move away from it, for a tranquil moment.
Anar Lidror, Curator