Fatma Shanan

Fatma Shanan (b. Julis, northern Israel, 1986) lives and works in Julis and Tel Aviv, Israel. As a Druze artist, Shanan makes paintings and videos that resonate with personal memories and the cultural history and traditions of this distinct Arabic-speaking minority, which hews to its own religion and cultural norms. Repeated motifs of oriental carpets, self-portraiture, and landscape representations of her village Julis indicate the strong bond to her cultural identity as well as her conflicted attitude towards it. Influenced by nineteenth- and twentieth-century European traditions of realist painting, Shanan strives to deconstruct firm definitions concerning painting, as well as gender roles and ethnic identities. The artist’s body as it appears in her pictures is rigid and passive, but it is never isolated from its context. Her work suspends the difference between figure and ground that defines classical portraiture, for the body cannot be thought without its environment. Shanan’s creative practice encompasses sculpture and performance art as well as painting, and the idea of assigning a place to an I that has attained sculptural definition and exposing it to the real space around it palpably informs each of her paintings. The artist’s body itself translates the physical experience of her performances into painting. Rigidity becomes motion that is frozen in the picture.

Submitted by DITTRICH & SCHLECHTRIEM