Tal Dekel

Subversive Uses of Perception: The Case of Palestinian Artist Anisa Ashkar

This article examines the ways in which Palestinian artist Anisa Ashkar relates to the subject of perception, as she employs the “minor” senses of smell and touch in order to undermine socially constructed categories. Using materials such as margarine, flour, sugar, milk, and black coffee—culturally considered feminine and domestic—she transgresses their normative usage in order to demonstrate her intersected, complex position as a woman and a dark-skinned Muslim Palestinian working in a white, patriarchal Jewish society as well as in a middle-class, male-dominated art field. Using her own body, as well as those of others, her performances elaborate processes of positioning and repositioning—presenting her own complex and multilayered identity as much as that of the audience. Her pieces recurrently speak back to hegemonic constructions of bodies as she strives to collapse the binary distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, private and public, Jew and Muslim, white and black, Israeli and Palestinian, affluent and poor.

In Search of Transnational Jewish Art: Immigrant Women Artists from The Former Soviet Union in Contemporary Israel

The article explores the subject of contemporary Jewish identity through the case of young immigrant women artists from the former Soviet Union in Israel, with particular emphasis on an analysis of the gendered aspects of their religious identity. Drawing on an interdisciplinary method, the research is based on in-depth interviews with artists, artwork analysis, and various theories from the social sciences and humanities. The articles main argument is that an analysis of the artistic practices of this and similar understudied social groups, particularly those practices undertaken in moments of conflict or times of deep social change, produces a more subtle understanding of the shifting modes of Jewish identity in the age of globalization and transnationalism, whose phenomenon of mass migration has led to the construction of new multi-hyphenated, hybrid identities.