Located in the heart of Tel Aviv, the African Studies Gallery strives to stimulate critical thinking and to challenge viewers conventional understanding of Africa as a cultural entity. Through exhibitions and cultural events we seek to mediate African art to the general public, hoping to access the continent's rich and divers heritages.
Jan - Jun. 2021
The exhibition My Body is a Monument, proposes to examine the various aspects of artists’ subjective identities as a flexible rather than a rigid continuum, which produces a multilayered fabric of identities that make up Israeliness without solidifying it.
The artists presenting in the exhibition open a window onto the personal and collective experience of being a woman and an artist from a different community in Israeli society. Each maneuvers between her unique biography and a feminist political discussion, as well as critical reflection about her community and Israeli society in general. Most highlight the human body and use it to examine the different and similar, their exclusion and belonging. At the same time, they do not ignore issues of ethnicity, sexuality, gender and race. All the artworks, therefore, covey concepts of multilayered identity and protest against the shallowness of their subsuming under any monolithic social category, be it “Ethiopian”, “Druze”, “Bedouin” or “asylum seeker”.
