Red Tent

As in a continuously unfolding play, the figures of Michal Tamir’s family members have appeared over the years on large-scale sheets of paper and canvases. Tamir depicts them repeatedly, immersed in everyday routines, encounters, and gestures. Her first solo exhibition, “Red Tent,” likewise brings together the family that surrounds her, but this time the new body of work focuses exclusively on women. The female sphere—a house shared by a grandmother, mother, and three sisters, in which Tamir grew up and was shaped—assumes renewed presence in light of recent changes and separations.

In the eponymous novel The Red Tent, Anita Diamant creates a fictional, utopian feminine space in which women gather for rituals, as well as spaces in which they can share experiences centered on the cycles of the female body during menstruation and childbirth, but also touching on psychological crises, violence, and loss. The novel offers an alternative feminist reading of antiquity through the biblical story, while foregrounding the female need for shared presence. The Red Tent outlines an ideal space in which women pass down knowledge and feminine tradition from generation to generation, engage in joint processing, provide mutual support and healing, and above all acknowledgment and identification within a peer group. Through the book’s characters, who function as “sister figures” to one another, Diamant shows how women encounter themselves through other women, and how feminine subjectivity is shaped through this mutual reflection.

Through painting, Tamir explores the female clan to which she belongs. Figures embodying the artist herself, her sisters, and even the next generation of women in the family appear time and again, undergoing transformations from painting to painting, changing roles, colors, and faces, until individual identities can no longer be clearly distinguished. Tamir creates a unity between the figures and the background, merging them into a single painterly fabric. The personal story is pushed aside, giving way to an intimate sense of solidarity and shared fate. In sisterhood, these women once again dwell together within the gallery, which becomes a surrogate red tent—reflecting one another like an infinite mirror and granting visibility and recognition to each other.

 Na’ama Haneman

Events in the exhibition:

• Saturday 7.3 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Michal Tamir – postponed

• Saturday 2.5 at 12pm | Gallery talk with Michal Tamir
• Tuesday 26.5 at 5pm | Gallery talk with Michal Tamir &  Na’ama Haneman