Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

As the curator of the Exhibition Trespassing, which was exhibited at the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem in 2020, I share extensive field research I conducted during the years 2017-2020. My journey included studio visits, curatorial mentoring and in-depth conversations with 15 women artists hailing from a conservative, religious, and patriarchal background, who created bold art that confronts the conventions of the society from which they come. I presented the results of this process in the exhibition at the museum, while trying to coordinate the spirit of the works with the visual language and the design of the exhibition space. During the session, I demonstrate the main theme of the exhibition using the artwork of the participating artists. Their contemporary artwork, created especially for the exhibition, was done in various mediums such as sculpture, hyper-realistic painting, photography, installation, mural, video and more. I show how each of the works used the medium and the artistic media in a refined and complex way, in order to simultaneously converse with the historical and cultural conventions of the artist’s community of origin, while negotiating the contemporary existence of the artists as citizens of modern and democratic Israel.