Michal Shamir

Born in Ramat Gan, 1957
Lives and works in Givat Nili

In the late 1980s, Michal Shamir studied for an MFA degree at the School of Visual Art in New York, where Hannah Wilke was one of her teachers. Their frequent meetings and discussions about life and art had a decisive impact on Shamir. Shamir presents the works she created following Wilke's death in homage to her teacher. Writing on her own feet, she attends to the relations between teacher, artist, and mother, while bearing in mind the following statement by Wilke: "Art should exist in the space between chewing gum and caressing the transparent skin on the back of your dying mother's hand."


Hannah Wilke

1940-1993
New York, USA

In the 1970s, Hannah Wilke was a pioneering feminist and Conceptual artist, and one of the first women artists to use their own bodies in photographs, videos, and performances. She photographed herself with chewing gum stuck to her body, and presented herself in the nude as a glamorous model or a figure inspired by images of Venus. These strategies were aimed at deconstructing prevalent myths of beauty, while undermining the uses of the female body in mainstream culture and in the media.
In 1993, Wilke died of lymphoma. Her last work, Intra-Venus, which was exhibited that same year, included a series of photographs that revealed the traces of the disease in her body. In these works, Wilke continued to photograph herself in the nude in the same Venus-inspired poses. The results were at once powerful and disturbing, charging her entire body of work and her representations of women over the years with chilling irony. Following her death, her art received a new wave of appreciation, and her works were featured in exhibitions worldwide.