Dafna Kaffeman: “Artist and Social Activist”(1) By Davira S. Taragin

Since her student days at Amsterdam’s Rietveld Academy in the late 1990s, Dafna Kaffeman has used her art to make increasingly transparent statements on life in her homeland of , focusing on difficulties exacerbated by the Arab-Israeli conflict. As was symptomatic of the times, earlier commentary has emphasized her medium, lampworked glass, rather than the message. However, a trilogy of assemblages in which glass plays a secondary role, Persian (2006), Red Everlasting (2008), and Mantis Religiosa (2010), have helped cement her reputation as an artist primarily interested in political commentary.

Kaffeman’s focus on message is a direct outgrowth of her undergraduate studies at Rietveld as part of an exchange program with Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Rietveld’s glass department under the direction of artists Richard Meitner and Mieke Groot was recognized for its strong commitment to the medium as a vehicle for contemporary expression; students were encouraged to downplay its materiality by combining it with other media. Meitner’s investigation of the word as image also may have left an impression on Kaffeman. By 2001, she was creating her first site-specific installation using words as images and actively involving the viewer. As part of a project in Portugal, she wrote and had published a book of erotic poems and then projected the Hebrew versions of these poems on the walls of an eighteenth-century tiled chapel, with Portuguese translations in chalk on the street below. Videotape was used to record the time between observation and comprehension by passersby.

In Animality (2002), the first body of work executed after Kaffeman received her MFA from the Netherlands’ Sandberg Instituut, countless thin, lampworked glass thorns were adhered to silicon, which dramatically altered the medium’s optical and rigid nature. Laid on the floor or hung on the wall, the sculptures resemble animal skins or even road kill. Wolves, an ongoing series begun in 2003, continues this aesthetic (fig. 1). The Tactual Stimulation series (2006) (fig. 2) of colorful, rotund forms like cacti or sea urchins juxtapose the thorns with additional materials like clay and sponge. Since 2006, fiber has become a primary component of works such as the trilogy of minimalistic mini-environments in which spidery lines of hand- embroidered Hebrew, , and Latin text counterbalance spare lampworked glass flora and insects on expanses of white fabric (fig. 3).

Kaffeman chooses and animal life to make complex statements on the Arab-Israeli situation without blaming one particular party or revealing her own opinions. Even early on, she was reticent about relating her work specifically to life in Israel: “My main subject is human behavior….Animals are a good way of watching ourselves.”(2) However, the Animality series, which on one level deals with the artist’s fascination with the hunter’s primal instinct, was created during the Second Intifada and can be seen as a statement about it. Similarly, the wolf, a motif Kaffeman has explored since 2003, is a common metaphor for the numerous players in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Kaffeman’s post-2006 work relies heavily on viewer experience. The trilogy, for example, is blatantly political. The embroidered inscriptions are based upon sentences in the Israeli press. Out of context, they seem poetic and often simplistic, especially in translation on labels. For Kaffeman, these inscriptions create a “gap between what we see at first glance, and the complex meaning that is revealed after we comprehend the text.”(3)

This impact of the “gap” extends as well to the symbolism of her glass flora and insects. Within recent years a number of artists from a variety of backgrounds have rediscovered the late-nineteenth- and early twentieth- century lampworked glass flowers and marine creatures of the Dresden- based father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka. However, Kaffeman is one of the few to adapt these forms for contemporary political expression.

At the same time, assemblages such as Red Everlasting, Mantis Religiosa, and the recent What could be sweeter than going to paradise? place Kaffeman squarely in the midst of the DIY (Do-It-Yourself) movement in which artists involve hobbyists in their politically or socially charged statements. Kaffeman embroidered the text herself in the Persian Cyclamen series, then enlisted others in the creative process in hopes of reigniting their interest in the political situation. She chose Norwegian women to embroider Red Everlasting because they did not understand the text, thereby adding another variable in her ongoing investigation of the time span between initially encountering text and understanding it. Similarly, Kaffeman selected six Jewish men from Israel having served in the army to embroider Mantis Religiosa using whatever they thought appropriate: one of the texts about a thwarted suicide bomber and his female lover depicts two male lovers (figs. 4 and 5). The Hebrew text on What could be sweeter than going to paradise? was sewn by Israeli women known to the artist, including her mother.

Recently, Israel has reaffirmed its position in the international art scene as a significant player in contemporary video and performance art; most of these works address life in Israel. In the small but energetic glass department at Bezalel, Dafna Kaffeman augments this contribution with her own form of work that actively engages the viewer in centuries-old issues.

1 Dafna Kaffeman and Mosh Kashi, unpublished manuscript, sent by email to the author, September 26, 2010.

2 Henrietta Eliezer Brunner, “Between the Obvious and the Obscured,” in Dafna Kaffeman: Persian Cyclamen (Berlin: Lorch + Seidel, 2006), p. 9. 3 Kaffeman on Red Everlasting, email to the author, October 21, 2010.

Fig (1)

Wolf 01, Wolf 02 from the Hunters and Hunted series, 2010 Glass, silicon, and aluminum Left to right: Wolf 2: 26 x 37.4 x 2 inches; Wolf 1: 31.5 x 27.6 x 2 inches Collection of the artist Photography Shai Halevi

Fig (2)

Tactual stimulation, 2006 Glass and silicon 7.5 x 7.5 x 7.5 inches Collection of the artist Photography Leonid Padrul Kwitowski

Fig (3)

Red Everlasting ( sanguineum) from the Red Everlasting series, 2008 Embroidery by Kari Johannesen Glass, fabric, and thread 19.3 x 19.3 x 6.3 inches Collection of the artist Photography Eric Tschernow

Fig (4)

“But I have come to detest life,”, from the Mantis Religiosa series, 2010 Embroidery by Yoav Weinberg Glass, fabric, and thread 6.3 x 27.2 x 19.3 inches The Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung, Munich, Germany References: “But I have come to detest life, although I loved a girl, who was a year younger than me, and my family planned to ask for her hand, one day before I set out for the operation. I loved her very much.” Statement by a young Palestinian whose attempted suicide attack in Israel was averted as quoted from the newspaper article: Amira Hess, “Floating towards Heaven,“ Ha’aretz, April 4, 2003. Not in exhibition Photography Eric Tschernow

Fig (5) “But I have come to detest life,” from the Mantis Religiosa series, detail, 2010