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 Israel, 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 Cyclamen (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 handembroidered Hebrew, Arabic, and Latin text counterbalance spare
lampworked glass flora and insects on expanses of white fabric (fig. 3).
Kaffeman chooses plant 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 twentiethcentury lampworked glass flowers and marine creatures of the Dresdenbased 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 (Helichrysum 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