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Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel

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A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 August 2022) | Viewed by 32655

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Emma Gashinsky

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Guest Editor

Dance Graduate Program, Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, Jerusalem 9190401, Israel
Interests: Art in Israel; performance art; migration and culture; conceptual art; identity stratification

Dr. Tehila Sade

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Guest Editor

1. Department of Jewish Art, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan 5290002, Israel
2. Department of Arts, Ben-Gurion University, Eilat 8855630, Israel
Interests: contemporary art; memory culture; trauma theory; Polish art; photography; Holocaust representations; Art in Israel

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The impact of the past on present identities, a dominant subject in 21st-century global art, has become an especially prominent feature of the art created in Israel. It is articulated in a plethora of artworks that renegotiate identity through new artistic strategies of reassessment, reenactment, and even reimagination of the past. While offering alternatives to hegemonic historicizations, these representations mark a shift from the critique of power relations to interventions in the processes through which history is remembered and narrated. As Jane Blocker suggests, instead of viewing art as the subject of inquiry on the part of art historians, contemporary art should be addressed and analyzed as a form of writing or rewriting history, even as history itself.^[1]

Since its very inception, art created in Israel has exhibited a consistent preoccupation with issues of identity and self-determination. Beyond being a multicultural and multiethnic young immigrant state, Israel is further characterized by a significant social binary, fluctuating between Jewish and non-Jewish, Diaspora and Homeland, and Religious and Secular. The turbulent history of the country, saturated with wars and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, renders the inquiry of the past within Israeli culture a fertile ground for the investigation of hybrid, complex, intersectional, and stratified local identities.

This Special Issue of Arts will focus on the renegotiation of histories and identities in contemporary art in Israel. Taking Blocker’s idea as our point of departure, we invite contributions that will explore art in the local arena as a form of writing [or rewriting] history in an attempt to reveal its unique manifestations and characteristics. Of special interest is the mediation of the subject through performative media—performance and video art, dance, and new media—which evoke an enhanced awareness of context and temporality through (live or documented) presence.

To propose an article for publication, please send a title and short abstract to the Guest Editors, Emma Gashinsky ([email protected]) and Tehila Sade ([email protected]), with a copy to [email protected] by 1 June 2022. Full manuscripts should be submitted by the deadline.

[1] Blocker, Jane. 2015. Becoming Past: History in Contemporary Art. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Dr. Emma Gashinsky
Dr. Tehila Sade
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Art in Israel
performance
history & culture
contemporary art
identity
re-enactment

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Published Papers (13 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 2504 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Natural-Worker Leaves the Colonial Visual Archive: The Art of Vered Nissim

by Sivan Rajuan Shtang

Arts 2023, 12(4), 167; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040167 - 28 Jul 2023

Viewed by 2094

Abstract

The colonial visual archive has occupied in recent decades the work of scholars and artists from indigenous and racial minority communities, who revealed it as a major apparatus of historical meta-narratives. This article aims at pushing forward this preoccupation by revealing an additional scene: the art of Mizrahi women, descendants of Jewish communities of Arab and Muslim countries. Relying on a visual culture approach and focusing on an analysis of artworks by Mizrahi artist Vered Nissim, as well as on photographs of Mizrahi women, fund in Zionist archives, I demonstrate how Nissim’s work challenges the racial category of Mizrahi women as “natural workers”, constructed in the Zionist historical meta-narrative. Nissim does so by re-enacting the category’s paradigmatic visual image—the Mizrahi women cleaning worker—in a different way, visually and discursively. Body, voice, and visual image, three instances of the subjectivity of Mizrahi women cleaning workers that were separated, shaped, and mediated through Zionist colonial visual archives unite in Nissim’s work when embodied by a real Mizrahi woman cleaning worker: her mother, Esther Nissim. By casting her mother to play herself over the past twenty years, Nissim creates political conditions for the appearance of her mother as the author of her own history as she orally, bodily, and visually writes it in front of her daughter’s camera. Thus, Nissim joins a transnational phenomenon of global south artists who create political conditions enabling the self-imaging of colonized peoples, empowering the reading of colonial imagery and the historical meta-narratives attached to it through their situated knowledge and lived experience and, thus, constructing a counter history communicated visually. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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16 pages, 1739 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Born in Translation and Iteration: On the Poetics of João Delgado

by Lea Mauas and Diego Rotman

Arts 2023, 12(3), 95; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12030095 - 8 May 2023

Viewed by 1803

Abstract

João Delgado’s poetry first appeared as an anthology of translated poetry in He’arat Shulaym Issue 1, published in November 2001 in Jerusalem by the artist collective Sala-Manca. The entire issue was devoted to João Delgado. Delgado was a Portuguese-Argentinean poet, born in Lisbon circa 1920 (or not), who left Portugal as a political refugee for Buenos Aires. He disappeared in 1976 during the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). Since 1976, there has been no trace of his fate, although new fragments of his work are constantly being discovered, translated, and published by the Sala-Manca group. There is no evidence of any originals of his work. Literary critics in Israel praised Delgado’s poetry and art and even identified previously unknown relationships to poets and artists from the European avantgarde. In Sala-Manca’s artistic work, dating back two decades, João Delgado and his heteronyms would have a central role and focus, blurring the boundaries of the group, blurring the fictional with the “real”, and proposing a subjectivity that embraces multiplicity and dispersion. Translating his poetry into Hebrew, a foreign language (to Delgado), and bringing it into print for the first time in neither its original language nor the cultural context in which it was created may be seen as a kind of de-contextualization of the poet’s poetry, since Delgado always kept himself and his oeuvre connected to the immediate surroundings where it was produced. On the other hand, perhaps it is actually this possibility—to “become only in translation”—that is one of the outstanding characteristics of Delgado’s poetry, emblematic of its linguistic and conceptual elasticity. This paper examines João Delgado’s poetic work in relation to Sala-Manca’s artistic work and the way in which both Sala-Manca and Delgado create a “system of life” by being heteronyms of one another, allowing for a multiplicity of identities, and stressing the relation to Others. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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10 pages, 1404 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Re-Enacting Pasts, Presents, and Futures in the Middle East in Yochai Avrahami and Doron Tavori’s “Land of the Gilead”

by Merav Yerushalmy

Arts 2023, 12(3), 89; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12030089 - 4 May 2023

Viewed by 1282

Abstract

This article focuses on a performance titled In the Land of the Gilead, performed in 2012 by Doron Tavori and Yochai Avrahami at the Centre for Digital Art in Israel. The work was performed as a part of the exhibition Le’an (Where To?). Its title is derived from a plan suggested by Laurence Oliphant (a British colonialist bureaucrat, author, and Member of Parliament) in 1881 to settle Jews in the Gilead region east of the Jordan River. The article examines the ways in which Tavori and Avrahami re-enact Oliphant’s plan, which was never realised, as well as numerous other historical moments of Oliphant’s colonialist endeavours and those of his contemporaries, tying them to the present-day situation in the Middle East and elsewhere. The article also examines the wider contexts and curatorial strategies of the exhibition Le’an, which focused on alternative Zionist histories that challenged Zionism’s exclusive focus on the land of Israel. The article suggests that by juxtaposing nuanced and complex re-enactments of numerous and conflicting histories, the work prompts audiences to reconsider their political and national understanding of such colonial and Zionist histories, allowing these complex pasts (which are often celebrated or silenced) to be articulated as integral to contemporary national narratives. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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37 pages, 9859 KiB

Open AccessArticle

What Is It Like for You? Rethinking Voice Appropriation in Parafictional Identities in Israeli Art

by Keren Goldberg

Arts 2023, 12(1), 27; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010027 - 3 Feb 2023

Viewed by 2680

Abstract

The article focuses on two parafictional figures created by Israeli artists at about the same time in the early 2000s: Oreet Ashery’s Marcus Fisher and Roee Rosen’s Justine Frank. Through a close reading of these case studies, I examine the phenomenon of parafictional characters as extreme cases of voice appropriation. Against the background of rising international concern with cultural appropriation, and of the Israeli sociopolitical context characterized by a multiplicity of often conflicting identities, I argue that such appropriation is, in fact, a basic aesthetic procedure. Using Hannah Arendt’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic judgment as political judgment, and her articulation of an “enlarged mentality” as necessary for both aesthetic and political thinking, the article demonstrates how the ability to imagine a position different from your own is inherent for aesthetic representation as well as reception. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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24 pages, 10778 KiB

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“And People Shall Be Contaminated by My Doctrine”: Religion, Science, and Nationalism in Assi Meshullam’s Order of the Unclean

by Yonatan Amir

Arts 2023, 12(1), 8; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010008 - 4 Jan 2023

Viewed by 1903

Abstract

This article discusses Assi Meshullam’s inter-discipline ongoing art project Order of the Unclean, while addressing issues of Religion, Art, Nationalism and Science embodied in the work. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and Bruno Latour’s discussion on the concept of modernism, the article argues that Meshullam returns to the polytheistic history of the area, and provokes the tension between religious faith and heresy, not in order to “take a side” in the debating between religiosity and secularism, but to put the so-called contrasted terms in question, mark their points of mutual inclusion, and offer a complex perspective on the relationship between the sacred, the secular and the national in modern Israeli society. The study lies in an academic examination of Meshullam’s monumental work for the first time, combining knowledge and methodologies in art history, comparative religion studies and critical theories. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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25 pages, 7853 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Defying Ornaments

by Nissim Gal

Arts 2022, 11(6), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060130 - 19 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2299

Abstract

The article will discuss works of art produced by Palestinian artists, in which the ornament functions as an intermediary for conveying signs, symbols, messages, and identities. In Muslim tradition, the ornament represented, and visually participated in, establishing the social order, and was also a signifier of a distinct theological, social, dogmatic, and gendered identity. The works at the heart of this article present the ornament as part of an aesthetic and ethical inquiry, a means of reenacting individual and collective history as well as preserving and deconstructing conventions, a method that is both poisonous and a remedy for social hierarchies, fixed identities, and oppressive power relations. I argue that the ornament represented in contemporary Palestinian artworks reflects a destructive or constructive urge, which Mark Wigley describes as an: “elaborate mechanism for concealing and preserving, if not constructing, identity.” Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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26 pages, 7449 KiB

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Art-Heritage-Environment: Common Views Art Collective Engagement with Bedouin Minority in Israeli Desert Region (2019–2021)

by Irit Carmon Popper

Arts 2022, 11(6), 128; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060128 - 19 Dec 2022

Viewed by 2609

Abstract

The Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants of the southern Israeli desert region share a common desert vista. However, they are diverse, multicultural communities who suffer inequity in access to valuable resources such as water. Between 2019 and 2021, Common Views art collective initiated a socially engaged durational art project with Bedouin and Jewish inhabitants entitled Common Views. The art collective seeks to enact sustainable practices of water preservation as a mutually fertile ground for collaboration between the conflicted communities, by reawakening and revitalizing rainwater harvesting, as part of traditional local desert life. Their interventions promote new concepts of Environmental Reconciliation, aiming to confront social-ecological issues, the commons, and resource equity, grounded in interpersonal collaborative relationships with stratified local communities. Their site-specific art actions seek to drive a public discourse on environmental and sustainable resources, while reflecting on the distribution of social and spatial imbalance. They take part in contemporary art discourse relative to socially engaged practices, yet their uniqueness lies in conflictual sites such as the discord arising from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and their proposed model for resolution linking politics with environment. It utilizes renegotiation with histories and heritage, as a vehicle to evoke enhanced awareness of mutual environmental concerns in an attempt at reconciliation on political grounds. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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27 pages, 5761 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Holy Land within The Holy Land: Duc in Altum as a Case in Point

by Assaf Pinkus, Neta Bodner and Einat Segal

Arts 2022, 11(6), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11060121 - 28 Nov 2022

Viewed by 3577

Abstract

During the last five decades, the entire Christian religious landscape of the Sea of Galilee has undergone a gradual and steady reshaping, with devotional centers renovated, rebuilt, and even re-invented. Together they frame the area around the Sea of Galilee as A Holy Land in itself, an enclave not only with unique characteristics distinguishing it from The Holy Land as a whole, but also in competition with it. Among the many establishments, one site does this explicitly in both word and image: the Duc in Altum center of worship built on the presumed location of the ancient city of Magdala. In this article, we explore the visual strategies and mechanisms that enable the site to assert its alleged authenticity and legitimacy; lay the foundations for a theoretical framework for understanding the ideological processes of the current Christian art around the Sea of Galilee; and suggest that these strategies are paradigmatic to the redefining of the religious and political identity of the entire region of the Sea of Galilee in order to establish it as A Holy Land of its own. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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17 pages, 16959 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Appropriating Canaanism: Ruth Patir’s Reanimation of Judean Pillar Figurines

by Hava Aldouby

Arts 2022, 11(5), 108; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050108 - 21 Oct 2022

Viewed by 2477

Abstract

This article addresses a body of works by the video artist Ruth Patir, in which Israeli womanhood in the 2020s is interrogated through Iron Age female statuettes, known as Judean Pillar Figurines. By means of motion capture technology and 3D animation, Patir features contemporary Israeli women uncannily moving and speaking through the bodies of millennium-old female figurines, whose history and function are still under debate. In Petah Tikva (2020), Patir situates these hybrid figures in a modern IVF clinic, offering a biopolitical perspective on Israeli society’s compelling maternal impulse. Marry Fuck Kill (2019), in turn, ponders Israeli women’s legitimation of their femininity, across the generational gap between the artist and her mother, here cast in the role of an imposing Iron Age figurine. The paper addresses Patir’s work in both biopolitical and phenomenological terms, arguing that the sensual appeal of the archaeological objects often undermines the videos’ political critique. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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14 pages, 596 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ballet and the Renegotiation of Identity among Jewish Orthodox Women in Israel

by Janice L. Ross

Arts 2022, 11(5), 107; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050107 - 21 Oct 2022

Viewed by 2154

Abstract

This article explores how competing images of Jewish corporeality and gendered identity are emerging in Israel through classical ballet by religious girls and women. It traces the cultural, political, and religious implications of this in the context of masculine Zionist ideals of the valorization of the corporeal. Focusing on a group of pioneering Israeli women it traces how they have reshaped the study of ballet into a liberatory yet modest practice for Orthodox women across a range of Israeli religious communities. The revolutionary efforts that linked the founding of the state of Israel with a new body are viewed through a revised feminist perspective, one within the paradigm of a religious counterrevolution. Just as the laboring body of the secular folk dancer of the Yishuv has stood for socialism, egalitarianism, and muscular Judaism while relegating the religious body to the sidelines, it is possible now to read an image of the return of the religious, via the feminized body of classical ballet, as emblematic of the new Jewish woman of Orthodox communities. I argue that through the study of ballet a politics of piety is operating among Orthodox Jewish women making it a medium through which they are changing assumptions about agency, patriarchal norms, and nationalist politics. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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18 pages, 948 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Rerooted and Reimagined: Dance, Palestinian Women, and the Reclamation of Urban Spaces

by Hodel Ophir

Arts 2022, 11(5), 106; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050106 - 21 Oct 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 3384

Abstract

Manar Hasan employs the term “memoricide” to describe the systematic eradication of Palestinian society from modern memory, a process, she points out, that occurred not only through the destruction of its major cities, but also through the erasure from public consciousness the inhabitants of those cities, and specifically the Palestinian women who once played highly visible, integral roles within them. This paper enters into conversation with Hasan’s argument in its exploration of the work of Palestinian choreographer Shaden Abu Elasal, focusing on dances performed in urban spaces—locations from which she draws historical and creative inspiration to imbue her choreography with layers of meaning. I show how through her choreography, Abu Elasal reroots and uproots herself from the place in the very same acts of dance. She resurrects both the city and the women, revealing the obscured and retrieving the forgotten. I argue, then, that in staging dances in what Marc Augé terms “anthropological places” in Israel/Palestine, locations saturated with historical and conceptual significance, Abu Elasal both deepens her roots to the land, her land, and rises anew from it, freeing herself of its heavy shackles. Moreover, by reintroducing specifically Palestinian women dancers as elements of the “flesh and stone” of Israel/Palestine, spaces rife with histories of trauma, dominated by patriarchy and a Zionist ideology that privileges Jewishness and whiteness, Abu Elasal excavates a forgotten past, negotiates a restrictive present, and shapes a future for herself and her community. The paper brings together the ideas of anthropological space, which recognizes the identity of place as not merely physical but comprised of the breadth of human activity (symbolism, history, imagination, vision) that has taken and is taking place in it; and dance’s power to inspire a sense of losing oneself or transcending the existing, tangible world. In both ideas, consciousness and the material, stone and body, entwine and shape one another in the ongoing process of (re)forming identity and reclaiming history. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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19 pages, 6364 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Amira Ziyan, Hiding in the Light: A Synergy of Contrasts as a Visual Code of “Otherness”

by Noam Topelberg

Arts 2022, 11(5), 102; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050102 - 12 Oct 2022

Viewed by 2273

Abstract

This article presents an interpretation of the works by the Israeli–Druze photographer Amira Ziyan, focusing on a series of photographs from 2017. These portray reenactments of actions identified with traditional roles of women in Druze society, such as cooking and cleaning. Employing a unique visual language and choice of form and content, the artist depicts a confrontation between a clear set of rigid and traditional boundaries and values and a contemporary, post-modern reality in which these boundaries and values are blurred. The interpretive reading proposed here describes a synergy between visual codes of minorities and accepted visual codes of their surrounding pervasive culture in contemporary Israel. Ziyan’s work offers a glimpse into visual codes of “otherness” that express the inner world of an artist who grew up on the margins of society but strove to be accepted as an essential part of its main artistic current. Focusing on this perspective contributes to ongoing discourse regarding contradictions inherent in Israeli society and identity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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20 pages, 4786 KiB

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Thou Shalt Tell Thy Daughter: Mothers Tell Daughters Their Holocaust Story—Three Case Studies of Contemporary Israeli Women Artists

by Hadara Scheflan-Katzav

Arts 2022, 11(5), 94; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts11050094 - 22 Sep 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2166

Abstract

The story of Israel and its raison d’être are suffused by memories of the Holocaust, which construct the self-definition and identity of the state. This article examines works by three contemporary Israeli women artists—Dvora Morag, Miri Nishri, and Bracha Ettinger—who subvert the traditional telling of history and enable rethinking of the past as the basis for the individual’s existence in the nation state. Through the works of these artists, official memory disintegrates into fragments of personal memories of the artists’ mothers, enabling a new moral, historical perspective. The reconstruction of history through stories that pass from mother to daughter contrasts sharply with Jewish tradition in which the historical story passes from father to son. The yearly Passover retelling of the Exodus admonishes “Thou shalt tell thy son on that day to say, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt’”. The two narratives, the Exodus from Egypt and the Holocaust, are told as stories of redemption of the Jewish people—from ruin to resurrection. The art examined here reassesses the past, while unraveling parallels between the stories from a female perspective that reflects a personal moral stance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Renegotiating Identity, Reenacting History – 21st Century Art in Israel)

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