Anisa Ashkar (born 1979) is a Palestinian contemporary and interdisciplinary artist with a focus in performance, photography, painting, and drawing. She has made shedding cultural constructions and fighting categorizations – such as feminine and masculine, Palestinian and Israeli – a focal point of her work. Much of her work is influenced through her life experience as a woman, Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab.
Early life and career influences.
Being born into occupation, a powerful aspect of her life and stimulated her desire for to create art. An early art form she adopted during her collegiate-career at Beit Berl, where she began studying art, was Arabic calligraphy drawn upon her face with make-up. The reason she chose to use this art method was to embrace her Arab identity within a city, Tel Aviv, that saw her as French or Brazilian. She turned her face into a canvas to enshrine her Arab identity in an Israeli-majority environment which did not read or speak Arabic.
About fourteen years after she left college, she began working as an artist between her hometown of Acre and Tel Aviv/Jaffa. Within this space, she began again to be mistaken as other ethnic groups, thus prompting the renewal of the calligraphy make up medium. She recalled, "It's to remind myself that I am Arab, because I am constantly in Jewish or foreign space." Much of her work is influenced by her place in society and the labels she embodies: women, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian.
Career and works.
Ashkar's methodology within her works, the message she is trying to pass along, is to create a discussion within the society that humans cling upon. She would go on to state, "As an artist, I try to challenge the way we, women, Arabs, artists, experience our personal and professional existence. These starting points allow me to use art to explore the specific ways in which the definition of femininity has taken shape in different societies around the world...In my works I also raise questions related to the essence of art itself and the boundaries between the work and the artist, using my body and face as a canvas, which I decorate with Arabic calligraphy, as a symbol of folk and social customs in the Arab tradition." Much of her work resembles religious and cultural pieces within her truth and realm.
For over twenty years, Ashkar has been using her face as a canvas, writing daily sentences and phrases upon her skin – visible to all, while not understood by all. She does this as a piece of art, yes, but she also is trying to encourage conversations about her Palestinian-Arab identity.
Within the realm of her works, Ashkar has been creating various works for more than two decade in mediums such as: painting, installation, performance, and photography stemming from her personal-life's journey. In an example of one of most famous canvases, Ashkar's face is bestowed with calligraphy, an art medium she began using at the age of nine. While the language itself may be difficult to read and may be in a language which the viewer does not understand, she aspires to bridge the shape and content by making herself the artwork and the canvas. Ashkar demonstrates a creative and imaginative way of using language as an art medium – whether spoken or written. An especially profound example of her uses of language would be her performance in 2004, titled "Barbur 24000," which is named after her childhood home in Acre. In this performance, Ashkar can be observed aggressively and compulsively within a bath of milk. While scrubbing herself, her canvas, she recites Muslim purity rituals in Arabic, which are then translated into Hebrew for the Israeli audience by Aharon Barnea.
Yet another example of using her Arab identity within an Israeli-dominant space, she chooses to confront racial stereotypes. In her "E-Alina" performance at the Bat-Yam Museum in 2010, Ashkar begins to brew black coffee- a highly prominent feature of many Arab societies. Within the pot, she uses cardamom, hoping to elicit a sensory overload upon the audience. She then splashes the coffee onto the walls of the gallery, forming a "dark waterfall which clings to the white wall, creating what looked like dark-skinned body tissue." She would also paint and cover male and female performers with the black coffee liquid and grounds. Following this, she invited engagement with the audience to drink the coffee. With the visuals, the smells, the tastes, the audience's engagement, Ashkar hoped to create though surrounding Arabism and femininity.
In a final example of her Palestinian identity being exhibited within her works, her 2003 performance titled "Finlat Beit Jalla." In this artwork, Ashkar covers a gallery with Goldband margarine – an Israeli staple-packaged in Israeli national colors. She is using glasses borrowed, causing her vision to be impaired and blurry. Her reasoning for using the glasses during the performance was as follows: "I wanted to understand how they see the world – as men, as Jews, as authority figures. But I couldn’t see properly with their prescription glasses; my sight has become all blurry, while trying to augment the soft, slippery, margarine on the gallery walls. I am not all that they are. I’m me – a woman, a Palestinian, an artist." She finally splashes feminine substances around the gallery, the male performers, and upon herself. She hoped to detail the nuances of a Muslim-Palestinian living within a Jewish-Israeli world. She conflates a mixture of her women-identity and Palestinian-identity.