Anat Shiftan, Ceramics

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Such Beauty | Anat Shiftan - Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center

Such Beauty

by the curator Professor Dani Shoshan.

Anat Shiftan grew up in a city that was already a trap of conflicting beliefs and political contradictions, where memory is not just a burden, but a curse. Born in Jerusalem (b. 1955), the Valley of the Cross and the Monastery of the Cross were a childhood playground. In her twenties, she emigrated to New York, a place where everyone is a stranger to themselves. Her installation is a quiet plea—an attempt to find meaning in a world that has long given up on her.

The installation itself is intentional chaos, just like life. On the gallery floor lies a pile of ceramic sculptures—flowers, fruits, leaves—distorted as if nature itself had fallen asleep and awakened in pain. Fat flowers, swollen tulips, artichokes twisting like worms, screaming colors: dull yellow-green, pink, dark purple, almost black. But most of the sculptures are pale, as white as dry bone, as if memory itself has been drained of blood. The still life here is not placed on a stand or within a frame, but on the floor. On the walls are paintings of flowers against a dark background, reminiscent of the delicate yet enigmatic images from the Monastery of the Cross in the Valley: red flowers rising above a basket of fruit, a symbol of fragile beauty alongside loss.

This installation is a silent protest against a world where nature is hidden from human eyes; a phenomenon shaped by the human hand, where the concept of nature is a product of the human spirit. Piles of flowers and fruits with black openings like dead eyes, or structures of flowers and twisting stems, pose a central challenge to the viewer: How can we reconcile the beauty of life with the inevitable sense of curvature, distortion, and death within its heart?

Nature and Femininity
This challenge is amplified when considering the installation within the context of women artists. Shiftan, like Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and Ana Mendieta (1948-1985), transforms the female body, with its flowers, round openings, and complex curves, into a mirror of pain, passion, and resistance. But unlike other artists who often sought solutions or healing, Shiftan does not offer comfort. Her installation is a battlefield where nature, memory, and culture struggle against each other. The viewer is called upon to gaze at their own reflection, which mirrors not only human fragility, but also our heavy responsibility as humans for the state of the natural world. The challenge here is not just aesthetic; it is ethical and existential. How can one revel in such beauty when it carries within it the cry of destruction?

Shiftan’s ceramic flowers and plants, with gaping openings and twisting stems, evoke the female body—fertile yet vulnerable, alive yet surrounded by death. This is a challenge to patriarchal myths that viewed nature as a feminine and passive force. Shiftan makes nature active, full of resistance, but also in despair. Her question is whether this nature can be saved, or if it has already been destroyed forever. In other words, how can art—an act of creation—–coexist with environmental destruction? What remains of us when time takes everything? The ceramic flowers do not wither, but they are also not alive—they are the essence of daily emptiness, and the viewer is required to confront this feeling of loss without any comfort. Each ceramic flower is a testament to the human hand’s craftsmanship, but also a reminder that true nature is disappearing under this same hand. The challenge here is moral: is our art part of the solution, or part of the problem?

Shiftan’s use of the ceramic material—a raw, heavy material—presents an additional challenge. Ceramics, a product of fire and earth, reflects the tension between the natural and the artificial, between survival and destruction. This installation becomes a battlefield, where the material carries both the story of humanity’s struggle against nature, and its surrender to it.

Shiftan’s installation stands out for its quiet despair. While Bourgeois used threads and bronze to express personal and family trauma, and Judy Chicago (b. 1939) created “The Dinner Party” as a celebratory feminist statement, Shiftan chooses a different path: a path of silence and of inevitable contemplation of what remains. But today, she is not alone. In our era, many female artists have addressed questions of installation and nature, exposing the tensions between the human body, the destroyed environment, and a society that continues to ignore the disaster. They offer no hope; they only reflect emptiness, alienation, and a longing for nature that is forever lost under the weight of progress.

Material and Culture
Shiftan, who has lived in New York for many years now, knows something about exile. It’s not just exile from Jerusalem, a city where every stone is a reminder of blood, but an existential exile, one where a person is a stranger to themselves. The flowers and fruits are still, dead ceramics, like the weight of the memories we carry that cannot be revived. She draws inspiration from artistic traditions: her flowers don’t glorify nature, but rather reveal the illusion of abundance. Like the Jerusalem of her childhood, here too, from afar, everything looks whole, but up close, everything is hollow, cracked, and fragile. Shiftan’s exile is not just geographic; it is cosmic. She is exiled from her past, from her family, from her hopes. This installation is a mirror: you walk among the piles and feel that memory. The paintings on the walls promise the illusion of a paradise that hides the ugly truth of the death of nature and man. Shiftan does not try to save us; she holds a mirror up to our failures—our futile attempts to hold onto something in a crumbling world.

This installation is a lament. A lament for her wounded mother, for Jerusalem left behind, for New York that promises everything and delivers nothing. This pile, with its frozen flowers, makes us think about our lives: perhaps beautiful from afar, but up close, a cold, fragile, and meaningless material. Shiftan doesn’t offer hope, and that is what makes her work so honest. In a world where everything is false memories, emotions, place—she gives us a pile of ceramics that asks us to observe and understand that we, too, are waiting for someone to give us meaning, and that someone may simply step on us and break us completely.

The pile on the floor is key. It is not elevated, not protected, and not pretentious; it is there, exposed, naked, left on the floor. Like the memories we carry, it is heavy, disorganized, takes up space, and is trampled underfoot. The viewer in the space is made to move carefully not to step on anything, but the fracture seems inevitable. This is what Shiftan wants: for us to feel the fragility, the danger, the memory of her wounds and her father, who was killed, and that they are part of this pile– not literally, of course, but emotionally. They are the white flowers, the ones that forgot their color. The paintings on the walls are ironic; they are simple, almost innocent, promising nature, a sacred garden, perhaps signs of memory, of the silence in the monastery.

The installation presents the viewer with a sophisticated exploration of exile, memory, and longing, while using ceramic material as a critical medium. Composed of a pile of flower and fruit sculptures on the gallery floor alongside flower paintings on the walls, is not merely an aesthetic presentation, but a philosophical argument reflecting a pessimistic view of the human condition: we live in a world where we have destroyed the true sources of our existence, and all that remains is a faded imitation that reminds us how far and deep we have fallen. The pile, placed directly on the floor without a traditional base, creates a sense of deliberate neglect, as if it were the remnants of a ruined nature. The paintings on the walls, on the other hand, depict the memory of flowers and nature from the monastery in the Valley of the Cross, thus creating tension between the three-dimensional space and the two-dimensional surface. Shiftan deconstructs the tradition of ceramic sculpture and uses it as a basis for critiquing the loss of authenticity in natural images.

During this period, the installation blends historical representations with a personal experience of exile. Jerusalem, Shiftan’s birthplace, represents a charged collective memory, while New York, her current residence, symbolizes an existential exile where otherness is the norm. The ceramic pile, inherently fragile, reflects the deceptive relationship between matter and memory; the flowers and fruits remain hollow, lifeless, resembling objects in a natural history museum that have forgotten their origins. The paintings on the walls, on the other hand, serve as an ironic illumination, hinting at an ideal garden that never existed, thus completing the dialogue between presence and absence.

Shiftan continues a tradition of artists like Bourgeois who use material as a metaphor for human psychology, and goes further still by incorporating the gallery space into the work. The pile on the floor forces the viewer to be careful with their step, creating a physical experience of tension, while the paintings create a virtual space that distances the gaze from the tangible. This is an artistic strategy that raises questions about the relationship between object and thought, body and memory, between place and non-place, and between beauty and absurdity.

Shiftan’s installation is not just a display of ceramic works, but an experiment in space and consciousness. She presents exile as a tangible existential state, but refrains from offering a solution. This disappointment is her strength. The work promises intimacy with the past, providing only beautiful material objects, and allowing us the opportunity to reflect on the very solitude that Shiftan is so adept at revealing.

Matter – hand – soul
Working with the material brings additional challenges—the unpredictability of the firing process, the material’s fragility, and the need to adapt to weight and shape—all of which require constant attention. The material requires patience, physical strength, and acceptance of limitations, making ceramic creation an act of dedication rather than just of mastery.

The perception of matter in ceramic sculptures is, ultimately, a perception of soul. Clay is not just a raw material; it holds within it the story of the hands that shaped it, the fire that baked it, and the time that transformed it. For ceramic sculptors, the ultimate significance of the material lies in its ability to transform a passive element into an active presence, shaping the idea as the idea shapes it. This is why ceramic works continue to fascinate—they are not just works of art, but living testaments to the encounter between humanity and nature, between the hand and the material, between life and death.

Shiftan’s installations do not offer hope; they leave us facing our own reflection, our distorted flowers and lives that are no longer complete. In a world where everything decays—nature, human connections, beliefs—her creations are the final proof that even in emptiness, there is still beauty. Cold, lonely, and unbearable beauty that demands us to continue to ask for answers. And isn’t this the true challenge of art in this era?

Curator: Professor Daniel Shoshan

I also wrote:

In the installation Such Beauty, I pay homage to a famous monastery I knew well as a girl. It is called the Monastery of the Cross, and we lived close to the valley where it was located. Monastery of the Cross - Wikipedia. It is believed that Adam's skull is buried there. and that the tree on which Jesus was crucified grew from it. This, of course, is a very loaded legend. When I was a child, the valley was abundant with flowers and trees. We picked the anemones that grew there and spent time within the monastery walls. A very magical space then and today.

The images in the show are manipulated photos of ancient frescoes from the interior of the church in the monastery. Specifically, the images I responded to are images of saints' feet and hands. I manipulated Renaissance-era botanical renderings of anemones and superimposed them on the fresco image. The red anemone is Israel's national flower.... which comes with its own layered meaning....I hung these small images at random heights on the walls to evoke the feeling of visiting an old church: functioning as a window into a memory or thought rather than acting like paintings in a gallery. The images on the windows are transparent and similar to the small photos, but appear as if stained glass.

The floral mound, in the center of the room, is meant to evoke a grave site. It so happens that Binyamini Center for Contemporary Ceramics is named after Isaschar Binyamini, who was a potter and was with my parents on the bus going to Egypt that was attacked in 1989 by terrorists. Both he and my father were killed in that attack. That was a very formative moment in my adult life. In our current time, when loss of loved ones continues to plague us all over the world, this installation is a lamentation for everyone's unjust loss of loved ones.

I hope this explanation helps to appreciate the installation. I'm sure you can understand the conflicting pleasure and difficulty it presented to me in the making.