Ayana Friedman

Abstract

Ayana Friedman is an Israeli multi-media artist who deals with politics, the Holocaust and society's treatment of the Other. This article concentrates on her feminist works and how Judaism and being the child of a Holocaust survivor affected her approach to this subject. Three main feminist interests are highlighted. First, the turn to “feminine” materials. Second, the struggle against the restrictions and abuse imposed on women and their specific Jewish examples. Friedman demands equality for women in Judaism, opposing customs that demean them and creating new ritual objects for them. Third, the conflicts women have between a career and motherhood, and the inter-generational problems they involve.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ziva Amishai-Maisels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2962-0153

Notes

1. For her Holocaust works and their context in Israeli art, see Brutin (2015), chaps. 3–4.

2. Unless otherwise indicated, biographical data and unmarked quotations are from the author's interviews with the artist (2012–2015). The chronology is based on her scrapbooks and her file at the Information Center for Israeli Art, Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

3. Pages in Maor (1994) are numbered both from the Hebrew and English sides, labelled respectively H and E.

4. As this description shows, she continued using ‘feminine' materials while working in other media.

5. Friedman's only self-portraits are in a Holocaust context.

6. The number of battered and murdered women in Israel rose during and after this war.

7. Bar-On had also been influenced by Fellini and Giulietta Messina (Porat 2001, 154) so that she understood what Friedman intended.

8. This ambiguity was present in her early Man Following his Destiny and Trap.

9. Friedman's choreography fulfills her childhood ambition to be a dancer, but she also sees the dancer as a moving sculpture (Wirtheim-Friedman 1990).

10. The only earlier tortured images of birth in Israeli art are Menashe Kadishman's series begun in the late 1980s that have a different message (Matzkel and Scheflan-Katzav 1997, 83, 121).

11. The name derives from the tiny stitches Chinese pre-pubescent girls were forced to embroider, a practice later forbidden by the government.

12. For the feminist aspects, see Liss (2009, xx).

13. This enormous work (360 cm high) was shown on a cylinder suspended from the ceiling, so that Inbal seemed to walk out of the photograph towards the spectator.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ziva Amishai-Maisels

Ziva Amishai-Maisels is Professor Emerita in the Department of Art History at the Hebrew University. She has written and lectured extensively on modern art, concentrating primarily on modern Jewish art, and in 1993 produced a major book, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on the Visual Arts. In 2004 she received the Israel Prize for Art History for her work in Jewish art and her book on the Holocaust.