Keren Benbenisty

Curatorial Description: This body of work explores the relationship between topography and toponymy in Israel-Palestine using historical printed matter, archival materials, and techniques of erasure, mark making, and inversion. 

The collage “faJaf” resulted from the application of the rules of Verlan — a type of French slang that reverses the syllables of a word — to vintage wrapping papers for “Jaffa" oranges, an iconic and politically charged brand named for a Palestinian city that has been absorbed into Tel-Aviv. Reversing the syllables produces a meaningless word that, like an erasure mark, signifies an attempt to correct.

The map is one of 26 created from “The Survey of Western Palestine,” a geographic survey carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) between 1881 and 1887. For this project, the artist printed each map at its original size, then erased it manually by coating it with Prussian blue pigment. Pieces of orange peel mark the location of every place whose name has been changed since the maps were produced. The gestures of erasure and mark-making blur the work of the cartographers; the maps become abstract images that challenge the nature of cartography and resemble celestial charts. 

The work's title is taken from a book that was part of the PEF Survey; it provides the translation and meaning of all Arabic place-names appearing on the maps. The printing, marking, and erasing techniques echo the methodical — and ongoing — efforts to Hebraicize Arabic place-names in Israel. The erasure of local histories and identities of the place has long been part of the Zionist project and has served to imprint its ideology on the land.

About

Keren Benbenisty (b. Israel, 1977) moved to Paris in 1998, graduated from the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and attended California Institute of the Arts (Cal’Arts). She has been artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; ISCP – The International Studio & Curatorial Program, NY; Residency Unlimited, NY ; Arts Maebashi, Japan; Open Sessions, The Drawing Center, NY; Artport, Israel; Air351, Portugal; The Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Belgium. Benbenisty has been the recipient of numerous international grants including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, Artis, Foundation for Contemporary Art. Benbenisty’s work has been exhibited at solo and group exhibitions at venues including: Ulterior Gallery, New York; Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, France; Arts Maebashi, Japan; The Drawing Center, New York; Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel; Centre for Contemporary Arts Prague, Czech Republic; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel, Mishkan Ein Harod, Israel. Keren Benbenisty’s work examines our relationship to contemporaneity by revealing both the ancient and modern constructs beneath its surface. Her project-oriented practice merges an investigative approach and subject based research along with traditional and technologically communicative visual means. These include but are not limited to drawing, sculpture, photography, film and video. At the core of Benbenity’s work lies a conception of time that is not linear but one that is cyclical in nature. Through the use of techniques such as repetition, re-contextualization, erasure, indexing, and cataloging she physically alters and transforms her subjects into temporal and often events of translation.  Her practice poetically enacts the social and the political inherent to biology, archeology, identity, myth and language.