Image: Sophie Abu Shakra, Present Absentee Code. Photo: Gustavo Hochman
The Benyamini Contemporary Ceramics Center in Tel Aviv is presenting Frayed Levant, a two-artist exhibition that brings together the late ceramicist Tania Engelstein and the architect, artist and designer Sophie Abu Shakra. Curated by Shlomit Bauman and Ami Steinitz, it opened on 8 October 2026 and runs until 21 November 2026.
According to the curators, the two women’s work, made a generation apart, weaves a Levantine culture grounded in female experience. Both move between design, craft and art, and both use architectural form as a way of tracing cultural roots.
Engelstein (1950–2008) was born in Tel Aviv. From the 1990s she made works that shift between ceramic vessels and architectural structures, built around a domestic world with roots in Egypt: fragments of home, decorated textiles and the family photo album. Writing about her in 2006, Bauman pointed to the presence of curling Islamic ornament and the smells, tastes and sounds of Arabic music in the work. The curators see in her art a world of “margins” in which craft, femininity and beauty express an Arab-Jewish identity distinct from the dominant concerns of local contemporary art.
Abu Shakra, born in Umm el-Fahem in 1996, held her first solo exhibition in 2023. She combines traditional techniques, natural and industrial materials and digital technologies, asking from a female perspective where traditional crafts and patterns fit within largely Western digital languages. Her project Present Absentee Code draws on cultural material she found within her own family, including the visual vocabulary of Palestinian embroidery, in which colours and motifs could signal place, family events or belief, as described in a text on her work published by the Umm el-Fahem Museum of Art.
An opening event is planned for 16 October, followed by a gallery talk on 13 November.
