Women Artists' Books in Wartime

International Women's Day is a reminder of what happens 365 days a year. This week, it is taking place in the shadow of the opening of the Epstein Files in the US, the public testimony of Gisèle Pelicot in France, and the murder of 46 women in Israel in 2025; and in light of the US-Israel-Iran war, which has already claimed the lives of over a thousand women, men, and children across the region and the Gulf, including dozens of girls in an elementary school in Iran who were killed in an airstrike. This year, I have chosen to focus on four books by female artists that deal with the body, the way it is subjected to external gaze, the tension between danger and control, and what remains, what is left on the body, who remembers, who testifies, and who is actually listening.

In Venice, Merav Shin Ben-Alon weaves together drawings, collages, and paintings alongside minimalist texts that come together to form a narrative. As you leaf through the pages, you discover the story of an artist who arrives at the Venice Biennale, where she experiences sexual trauma. Throughout the book, Ben-Alon presents fragmentary images, floating in white space, hints of what happened. Some are surrounded by stitches, others are made of them, small nails stuck in bleeding flesh. Who do these underwear belong to, this body, this silhouette?

In Diary of a Dancer, Elinor Carucci, who worked as a photographer and also as a Middle Eastern dancer at events, lays out the daily routine of an “Oriental” dancer. In panoramic, cinematic frames, she is seen applying makeup on the subway, in restrooms, and at the center of events, some of which, as she writes, she is “the surprise.” According to her, the audience is an integral part of the performance, and without an energetic connection to it, the dance becomes heavy and forced. Her smiling, radiant figure, surrounded by banknotes on the floor, highlights the tension between loneliness and the joy and splendor with which she adorns herself. In Carucci's photographs, she is the object of the audience's gaze, but also a photographer, subject to the camera's eye.

In Do You Think Art Should Be so Direct, Rakafet Viner Omer responds to the concepts of labor and art. The book contains children's drawings made on old doors based on photographs from porn magazines (a reference to bathroom door drawings, which are often sexual in nature or addressed to specific women), photographs of Viner Omer herself, and text works based on “help wanted” ads for sexual encounters. The book also includes a manifesto calling on women to stop going out to work, due to the sex economy to which women are subjected.

Never Dirty is the first artist's book to accompany Hila Lulu Lin Farrah Kufer Birim's solo exhibition. The book brings together drawings, prints, and poems, all of which are hybrids of images: hands and hair, Barbie legs and a broken egg, egg yolk and pearls, alongside sculptures whose purpose is to take them out of context—pleasure or pain, as in the poems—such as Nail my tongue to the floor or Peel me, peel me, bring on the stick. Between the clean and the dirty, she mocks the dichotomy of "masculine" and “feminine.”

06.03.2026