Lecture | The Female Reclining Figure in Art, Then and Now

Lecture | The Female Horizontal Reclining Pose in Art, Then and Now

Friday, September 18, at 12:00, Culture Cell, Kiryat Hamelacha — 6 Shvil HaMeretz, Tel Aviv–Yafo

Lecturers:

• Dr. Shahar Marnin Distelfeld — Head of the Art Department at Oranim College, researcher, lecturer, and curator
• Sigal Caspi — Curator of the exhibition Balanced Testimony at Makom LeOmanut Gallery

The image of a woman reclining in a horizontal pose is one of the most iconic images in the history of Western art. The woman—whether a mythological goddess, nymph, or odalisque—lies naked, looking in a mirror or staring toward the viewer with a glazed, vacant gaze, sometimes asleep. From Titian’s Venus, through Ingres’s odalisque, to Manet’s Olympia, the viewer positioned outside the image becomes the one who peeks, observes, and takes pleasure in her refined or seductive beauty.

The longstanding one-sided representation of women by male artists led critical feminist discourse in art to engage intensively with correcting it. In the lecture, we will discuss the representational tradition of women in art and examine the work of contemporary women artists from Arab society, who engage in a “battle of gazes” with the pose associated with the male gaze upon women.

From the text of the exhibition Balanced Testimony — opening: September 10

Curator: Sigal Caspi

Artists: Raida Adon, Nasrin Abu Bakr, Nirwana Dabah, Mai Da’as, Amira Ziyan, Samah Shahada, Razan Shami, Fatma Shanan, Sophie Abu Shakra

The women artists exhibiting in the exhibition work from a position of dual marginality: both as a gender minority within patriarchal Arab society and as a national minority in Israel. Through their bodies, they express a complex emotional range arising from their personal and collective situation within the Palestinian-Israeli sociocultural space.

While in the 1980s male Palestinian artists represented the female body as a metaphor for the beloved motherland, the artists in this exhibition place their own bodies at the center of the frame, in a horizontal pose. In doing so, they carry out a twofold action: first, they reverse the male gaze and shift it from its original position in the history of art, so that the woman being observed is also the observing artist—an act that prevents the reduction of female representation to a passive object. Second, they challenge social conventions and defy the system of demands and expectations placed on women, particularly in a patriarchal society.