Bio,
Ruty Chinsky
2014
Multidisciplinary artist, Belle Shafir, was born in Germany and has been living in Israel since 1972. For over two decades, she has been actively pursuing art in Israel and abroad. The bulk of her work is process-oriented and characterized by a thematic variety that merges the global and the personal.
​
In the early 2000s, she began dealing with issues that concern man’s interference with the natural order through genetic enhancement and cloning. The tiny pieces she created during that period address man’s inability to notice disruptions and deal with the harmful consequences of his actions. This artistic move has led her to examine her own identity, split in many ways and ridden with conflict, oscillating between cultures. Looming above it all, like a dark cloud, was the fact of her being the daughter of Polish holocaust survivors, who had immigrated to Germany at the end of World War II. Dealing with identity brought up some alarming memories which, previously silenced, were now piling one on top of the other. The essence and deceptive nature of memory became central motifs in her work. Knitted chains made from horse-hair taken from the family farm in Germany, reminiscent of damaged DNA sequences, were the first appearance of this theme in her art. Shafir later used the same hair to knit tiny spiders that resonated with Louise Bourgeois’ “Maman”.
During the recent year, Shafir began to process the family collection of photographs, which has since become a Pandora’s Box for her. She recovers images from its depths and confronts them by placing them on sheets of parchment, hoping to retell the story of her own life, and try to come to terms with the interrupted story of her family.
Multidisciplinary artist, Belle Shafir, was born in Germany and has been living in Israel since 1972. For over two decades, she has been actively pursuing art in Israel and abroad. The bulk of her work is process-oriented and characterized by a thematic variety that merges the global and the personal.
​
In the early 2000s, she began dealing with issues that concern man’s interference with the natural order through genetic enhancement and cloning. The tiny pieces she created during that period address man’s inability to notice disruptions and deal with the harmful consequences of his actions. This artistic move has led her to examine her own identity, split in many ways and ridden with conflict, oscillating between cultures. Looming above it all, like a dark cloud, was the fact of her being the daughter of Polish holocaust survivors, who had immigrated to Germany at the end of World War II. Dealing with identity brought up some alarming memories which, previously silenced, were now piling one on top of the other. The essence and deceptive nature of memory became central motifs in her work. Knitted chains made from horse-hair taken from the family farm in Germany, reminiscent of damaged DNA sequences, were the first appearance of this theme in her art. Shafir later used the same hair to knit tiny spiders that resonated with Louise Bourgeois’ “Maman”.
​
During the recent year, Shafir began to process the family collection of photographs, which has since become a Pandora’s Box for her. She recovers images from its depths and confronts them by placing them on sheets of parchment, hoping to retell the story of her own life, and try to come to terms with the interrupted story of her family.