New Article: Ozeri, The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art

Ozeri, Ram. “The 2015 Jerusalem Biennale for Contemporary Jewish Art.” Nashim 29 (2015): 142-6.
 
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.29.142
 
Abstract

The Jerusalem Biennale is a platform for professional artists whose current work relates, in one way or another, to the world of Jewish content within the conceptual framework of contemporary Jewish art. It does not attempt to answer the questions of what contemporary Jewish art is, or whether there is such a thing at all. The Biennale endeavors to create spaces where the discussion can take place and develop.

Many people view the fields of “Jewish art” and “contemporary art” as mutually exclusive. Jewish art is often associated with Judaica –traditional objects used in religious rituals – while contemporary art is characterized by the use of modern media such as video, sound, installation and performance, and by themes relevant to the present. The main challenge of the Jerusalem Biennale is to promote art that is both Jewish and contemporary. This focus offers a promising alternative to the conventional boundaries of Israeli art and opens the event up to the Jewish world at large.

 

 

 

Conference: AJS Program Book now online (Boston, Dec 13-15, 2015)

The 47th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies will take place in Boston, December 13-15, 2015.

The full program is now available on the AJS website: http://www.ajsnet.org/conference-menu.htm

You may also download the program here: PDF

 

 

Photo essay: Levac, Eye on Israel

Levac, Alex. “Eye on Israel.” Jewish Quarterly 62.2 (2015): 18-23.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0449010X.2015.1051695

 

Excerpt

Photography is supposed to be an international language. But is it really so? My photography is extremely culture-related. Since it’s concerned with human situations, mostly, it could be misunderstood, even meaningless, to people outside Israel. Understanding culture is easier for a native.

I photograph in Israel, for the Israeli viewer. It is not that I am aware of it all the time – but it is always there, in the back of my mind. It’s the way I see. I’m directing the sharpness and irony at us, Israelis.

 
 
 
 

New Article: Trajtenberg, When was Feminism? Israeli Women Art Critics

Trajtenberg, Graciela. “When was Feminism? Some Critical Reflections after Exploring an Unknown Group of Israeli Women Art Critics.” Women’s Studies 44.5 (2015): 635-56.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2015.1036159

 

 

 

New Article: Louise Bethlehem, Scratching the Surface

Bethlehem, Louise. “Scratching the Surface: The Home and the Haptic in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city and Elsewhere.” Scrutiny2 20.1 (2015): 3-23.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/18125441.2015.1035745

 

Abstract

This paper deploys the haptic, and more broadly speaking, notions of multisensory reading and spectatorship to reconfigure perceptions of home. It explores configurations of home in the practice of the late French-Israeli visual artist, Absalon, to draw tropes of “complicity” and “contagion” into an intersection with discourses of moral hygiene arising from the modernist preoccupation with denuded surface in the history of architecture. It then goes on to read a postapartheid South African text, Lauren Beukes’s Zoo city (2010), through the lens of these concerns. Beukes’s text, it claims, can be made to precipitate the historicity of the white suburban home under apartheid. The novel offers alternative iterations of domesticity, however, as metonymies of contagion shift into metonymies of conviviality. The final section of the paper investigates the vulnerability of the home against the background of the 2014 Israeli war on Gaza and its assault on the built environment. It explores an art exhibition, Postcards for Gaza, staged by the dissident Israeli organization, Zochrot, in the context of a previous military assault on Gaza in 2008. Here the reworking of photographic surface is made to gesture towards the possibility of political reparation in an alternate modality of complicity that Mark Sanders parses as “human-foldedness” (Sanders 2002).

 

 

New Book: Hochberg, Visual Occupations

 

Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

 

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists’ creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists’ exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel’s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

 

Table of Contents

 

Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone  1

Part I. Concealment  

1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting  37

2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship  57

Part II. Surveillance  

3. The (Soldier’s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone  79

4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress  97

Part III. Witnessing

5. “Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?”: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze  115

6. Shooting War: On Witnessing One’s Failure to See (on Time)  139

 

Closing Words  163

Notes  167

Bibliography  187

Index  207

Dissertation: Strohm, Contemporary Art, Politics and the Palestinians in Israel

Strohm, Kiven. Impossible Identification. Contemporary Art, Politics and the Palestinians in Israel. University of Montreal, 2013.

 

URL: http://search.proquest.com/docview/1504845797

 

Abstract

This thesis explores what it means for the Palestinian indigenous minority in Israel to produce art in a setting that has simultaneously controlled their movements and excluded them from full citizenship. It takes on the question of how Palestinian artists face discrimination within a monolithic state structure that defines itself primarily along religious and ethno-national lines. Most writing about art in colonial and postcolonial contexts tends to see art as a resource for asserting repressed ethnic, racial and indigenous identities in the face of ongoing control and domination. Art, in other words, is considered a political act of recognition through the assertion of a counter identity. The central question of this thesis concerns what happens when artists contest the colonial conditions within which they live without having recourse to identity-based claims about equality and rights. Based on intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the region, this research demonstrates that for Palestinian artists the political aspect of art is not related to claims about identity and that the relationship between art and identity is not homologous. Specifically, it explores artistic processes within a context in which spatiotemporal regimes of identification are being disrupted by an indigenous national minority. It establishes that politics in the case of Palestinian artists in Israel is a form of disidentification that is articulated through the figure of the present absentee. The central tropes found within the works of these artists can be seen as disruptive aesthetic acts, a “taking place” of politics that is between art and non-art, and outside of given identities; that is, a scene for the rupture of the “sensible order” of Israeli society through the affirmation and verification of an already existing equality.

 

 

Subject: Cultural anthropology

Classification: 0326: Cultural anthropology

Identifier / keyword: Social sciences, Visual art, Aesthetics, Palestine, Israel, Colonialism, Haifa,

Number of pages: 278

Publication year: 2013

Degree date: 2013

School code: 0992

Source: DAI-A 75/06(E), Dec 2014

Place of publication: Ann Arbor

Country of publication: United States

ISBN: 9780499277718

Advisor: White, Bob

University/institution: Université de Montréal (Canada)

Department: Faculté des arts et des sciences

University location: Canada

Degree: Ph.D.

Source type: Dissertations & Theses

Language: English

Document type: Dissertation/Thesis

Dissertation/thesis number: NS27771

ProQuest document ID: 1504845797