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

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

Friday, 16.10, at 11:00, Kiryat HaMelakha Culture Cell — 6 HaMeretz Path, 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—a goddess from mythology, a nymph, an odalisque—lies nude, looking in a mirror or staring toward the viewer with a glazed, opaque gaze, sometimes asleep. From Titian’s Venus, through Ingres’s odalisque, to Manet’s Olympia, the viewer outside the picture becomes the one who peeps, 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 in 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: 10.9

Curator: Sigal Caspi

Artists: Raida Adon, Nisreen Abu Bakr, Nirwana Dabbah, Mai Daas, Amira Ziyan, Samah Shahada, Razan Shami, Fatma Shanan, Sophi Abu Shakra

The artists exhibiting in the exhibition operate from a position of double marginality—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 position 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 the exhibition place their own bodies at the center of the frame, in a horizontal pose. In doing so, they carry out a dual move: first, they reverse the male gaze and shift it from its original position in art history, so that the woman being observed is also the observing artist—an act that does not allow the female representation to be reduced to a passive object. Second, they challenge social conventions and defy the system of demands and expectations placed upon women, particularly in a patriarchal society.