In/Visible: Reinserting the Jewish Female Body in Contemporary Art Practice

Brown Bag lunch with Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem speaking on In/Visible: Reinserting the Jewish Female Body in Contemporary Art Practice. Through the lens of erasure and invisibility, social practice artist and Torah scribe, Shoshana Gugenheim Kedem, will speak about her own body of work and the critical role it plays in the reinsertion of the female body in traditional Jewish practice and culture. Informed by feminist theorists, Gloria Anzaldúa and Bonna Devora Haberman, Shoshana will draw from her own life experiences and her 25-year career as an artist.

In addition to her socially engaged art practice, Shoshana is an essayist, curator and educator. She is occupied with curiosities about religion and ritual, feminism and patriarchy and systems thinking. She often reimagines traditional or patriarchal practices, primarily but not solely, Jewish ones, reinserting them, with new forms, into their familiar contexts. Some subjects of her work include erasure, branding, citizenship, silence, loss, ritual object, death and dying.

Shoshana was one of the first women in modern times to train and practice as a Torah scribe. Her scribal work inspired her international collaboration, Women of the Book, launched with the Jerusalem Biennale 2015, and is informing her current work on sustainable parchment manufacturing. After 20 years in Israel, Shoshana currently resides with her family in Portland where she is an MFA candidate in Contemporary Art Practice at Portland State University.