Anisa Ashkar

Born in Acre, 1979
Lives and works in Acre and Jaffa

Anisa Ashkar chose two members of the same historical generation, whose personalities and cultural activities bring together the traditional female role of salon hostess with that of an independent and active creator and writer. Taken together, these women - an American Jew and a Palestinian Egyptian - reflect Ashkar's cultural world, which lies between East and West. The decorative plates she has affixed to her paintings are printed with paintings by the 17th-century Spanish artist Murillo. At first glance, the paintings appear as variations on still-lifes filled with abundance. What they actually depict, however, are street children who are constrained to earn a living selling fruit, or who survive on leftover food. The decorative plates symbolically represent Ashkar's initial encounters with Western aesthetics and with living rooms in Western homes.


Gertrude Stein

1874, Pennsylvania, USA
1946, Paris, France

Gertrude Stein was born in the USA, yet spent most of her life in Paris, where she became an art patron and a key cultural figure between the two world wars. She moved to Paris in 1903 with her brother Leo, and the two created an art collection centered on early-20th-century avant-garde art. Stein also held a renowned artistic and literary salon in her home, which was considered a gateway to the cultural milieu of the time. As a writer, she experimented with automatic writing and stream-of-consciousness. Her best-known book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, was in fact her own autobiography, seemingly written through the eyes of her partner.


May Ziade

1886, Nazareth, Palestine
1941, Cairo, Egypt

May Ziade is a key figure in the history of Arab feminism during the Nahda - the period of Arab cultural awakening between the mid-19th century and World War I. From 1908 onwards she lived in Cairo, where she published her first book of poetry, in French, in 1910. In 1912 she opened a literary salon, where she hosted Egypt's most prominent literary figures. She was multi-lingual, traveled to Lebanon and Europe, published poetry books, worked as a journalist, and corresponded regularly with Jubran Khalil Jubran until his death, without ever meeting him. Two of the biographies she wrote are devoted to other pioneering Egyptian feminists. Together with Labiba Hashim and Huda Shaarwi, Ziade led the female participants in the revolution of 1919, which marked the beginning of the Egyptian people's struggle for independence. Ziade believed that Arab women could embrace Western values without relinquishing their identity. She herself never married, and wrote that a woman enslaved could not breastfeed her children since her milk smelled strongly of servitude.