At the turn of the millennium, with the emergence of a new generation in Israeli art, a wave of artists, the third generation of Jewish immigration from Arab Muslim countries, began to move. Since then, this generation has been challenging the mechanisms surrounding the creation and establishment of hegemonic knowledge about the Mizrahi populace in Israel.
Prominent in the work of these artists is their grappling with the structuring of Mizrahi femininity and masculinity through markers of racial othering and its propagation throughout the history of Zionist visual culture.
In view of this more than a century-long history, these artists assume the role of image producers, reconstituting it in a way that sheds its racialized components, and relates it within a new discourse that stems from situational knowledge and their own lived experience. This creative wave actually embodies part of the crystallization of what Ella Shochat has termed "Mizrahi epistemology." While doing so, the artists demonstrate a transition from institutional image to self-image, or as Igael Nizri calls it, "from noun to pronoun."
The work of artist Mati Elmaliach can be understood as part of this wave. Observing his work from the last two decades invites thinking on issues about contemporary Israeli identity and its transnational contexts, but all of it, so it seems, revolves around a central issue: masculinity.
In a series of self-portrait photographs that began to take shape in 2008, Elmaliach appears in different interior spaces—a hotel room, a hospital waiting room, a bedroom lit by the faint, fading light that filters in through the slats of an old window blind.
Against the background of these spare interiors, which appear abandoned and stripped of any domestic potential, emerges a body—the artist's body. Based on close-up photographs that evoke mixed feelings of intimacy and alienation, Elmaliach presents a local version of the casual photograph genre; banal fragments of existence, devoid of drama or heroics, which nevertheless embody an excess charge, in this case—of defiance.
In Portrait Exercise #3 (2008), Elmaliach is photographed from a bird's eye view. His body, like the mattress on which he lies, is bare, his arms spread out on either side of his head; his gaze turned towards the camera signals defeat, waiting, submission, like prey. In another photograph, Untitled (Clipping Nails) (2010), Elmaliach is seen sitting on an upholstered chair, his body, as if in a fetal position, leans in towards his toes. His limbs and upper body are bare, bruised, and scarred, and he looks strikingly "Mizrahi."
Scenes like these occur throughout the entire portrait series. The multiplicity of spaces evidences, on the one hand, the artist's engagement with and wandering in the public space. But from the photographs themselves, it appears that this body is absorbed mainly in retreat; the vulnerable male body turning inward, making do with a space of four walls, withdrawing from the outside world, cutting itself off from the social arena, shedding its laws, as if in mourning. What has he lost? What has disappeared?
Despite the detachment that characterizes the mise-en-scenes of the portrait photographs, their iconography is not disconnected from the history of masculinity in Israeli visual culture. It refers to a personality that became embedded in local collective memory as a charged symbol of oriental masculinity: the singer Zohar Argov, "The King"; a virtuoso who eclipsed the racial boundaries of Israeli society; a symbol of charismatic, assertive, and phallic Middle Eastern masculinity.
This model belongs to the social climate that began in the early 1970s, of a Mizrahi masculinity, as imagined by the second generation that rebelled against the subjugation of its members by the Ashkenazi male hegemony. The Mizrahi Black Panther movement embodied a paradigm of this political imagination. At the same time, as film researcher Raz Yosef has shown, Mizrahi phallic masculinity embodied a patriarchal logic that excluded women and femininity and where the male-dominated the political space.
In the case of Zohar Argov, the phallic manifested itself in sexual violence. In the world of Elmaliach's images, we find an opposite movement. Instead of an actual or symbolic exit onto the battlefield of the Israeli patriarchy, he turns inward, embedding himself in a feminine stance, shedding his clothes and donning the normative codes and Renaissance iconography of sexual availability. He presents the position of a male subject that does not reject vulnerability, passivity and submission, but teases and avenges the heteronormative Mizrahi male gaze.
In photographs such as Portrait Exercise and Mashrabiya #1, 2008, Elmaliach also mocks the Eurocentric, white, heteronormative gaze. These photographs, over which are printed Mashrabiya patterns, and especially in the photograph Untitled (2009), on which Elmaliach, using needle and thread, embroidered a kind of thin white Mashrabiya veil that falls over his face like a mask, corresponds with a stream of women's art from the Global South, including that of Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi. Her work directly confronts the history of Orientalist painting, which mediated the appearance of the community's women through a filter intended for a male, sexist, and racist, lens.
Elmaliach's Mashrabiya portraits remind us that the boyish body was also a site of predatory orientalist fantasy, a famous example of which is the painting The Snake Charmer (1879) by French artist Jean-Leon Gerome, which adorns the cover of Edward Said's book Orientalism. In Elmaliach's photographs, the Mashrabiya embodies a visual and material illustration of an appropriated element that was emptied and exploited in the West as part of an imperialist cultural logic. Placed over the portrait of a vulnerable male in order to mark the traces of the filter, it undermines the realistic effect of the photograph and reveals the illusion of the accessibility of identity.
Madaf thanks Sivan Ra'ajuan Shtang and Mati Elmaliach for bringing the text to the magazine and Sharon Assaf for the English translation.
Dr. Sivan Rajuan Shtang is a scholar of art and visual culture at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and a lecturer at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art and Sapir College. She is A co-editor of the anthology Visual Culture in Israel (2017). Recent articles focus on early 20th-century Zionist scopic regime, visual colonial archives, and contemporary feminist art while exploring intersections of marginality, liminality, body, and resistance as a methodological vantage point to examine socio-political and cultural systems and orthodoxies. Rajuan Shtang earned her BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, and her MA and PhD from Bar Ilan University. Rajuan Shtang is currently at work on a new monograph on Mizrahi Feminist Art and was recently appointed a fellow of the 2024-25 Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies, at the University of Michigan.