portrait

Raeda Saadeh Challenges the Masters

In Raeda Saadeh’s photography series “Great Masters,” the artist challenges four well-known Western paintings. Aida Nasrallah writes about the works of one of the most interesting Palestinian artists, delineating the way Saadeh makes space for herself as an artist and a Palestinian woman who voices her political protests.

Under the Restrictions #3

In the third chapter of her column, Goni Riskin takes advantage of the easing of the restrictions to make a series of portraits, with styling and makeup. As a precaution, she works on a rooftop, in natural light and open air. She uses a no-contact thermometer to take the temperature of her sitters, the makeup artist, and herself. She keeps the styling down to clothes from the sitters' closets, with outside loans of items when absolutely necessary.

Under the Restrictions #2

Goni Riskin joined a residency program at Arthura – a new center for art, design, and community in Emek Hefer (Hefer valley), in central Israel. She has chosen to take mostly pictures of the elderly population, in an attempt to understand how to create interaction while maintaining social distancing and wearing masks and gloves.

Under the Restrictions #1

In her new column, Goni Riskin looks at how she might continue to photograph under the coronavirus restrictions. In the first installment she creates a series of portraits while trying to observe the rules, which are often not entirely clear: stay within a 100-meters range from home, and then it's 500 meters; maintain a distance of two meters from other people; avoid entertaining at home people who do not live there.

Obvious Artifice

"Pre-Israeli Orientalism: A Photographic Portrait", written by Dor Guez, focuses on a photographic genre from the early decades of the twentieth century as a local, unique, and complex case of visual Orientalism. Hagai Ulrich reviews the book and suggests broadening the conversation through the values and characteristics of performance art.

An Expert Testimony

In Eyal Weizman’s new book, the reader joins the author as he hovers over contested territories in the Middle East, follows him as he traces the histories, ideologies, slippery borders, technologies, and narratives involved in the State-inflicted marginalization and displacement of the Bedouin inhabitants of the Negev desert, in Southern Israel. Rotem Rozental reviews “The Conflict Shoreline,” as well as Weizman’s methodology of forensic visual culture research.