EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Keren Benbenisty
I am a research-based, multidisciplinary artist working primarily with film and works on paper. My practice is fundamentally place-driven: each project begins with a specific geographic location and the historical events, scientific phenomena, or cultural practices tied to that locale. These localized stories serve as entry points to explore broader themes of migration, loss, and displacement—concepts that resonate deeply with my own experience living and working across continents, from Paris to New York, with recent research taking me to Morocco.
Each project revolves around the metamorphosis of organic materials that serve as both medium and metaphor. In Tristeza, orange peels metamorphosed into moldy blue pigments as I attempted to cultivate a transgenic blue orange, interweaving agricultural science with my family's migration history. In Jaydia, fish skin was transformed into celluloid film and mounted on 35mm slides. These materials carry their own histories of transformation, mirroring the cycles of change and adaptation that define experiences of displacement and belonging.
My current project, The Blackheads (Les Points Noirs), excavates a buried history of Jewish- Arab coexistence through Morocco's sacred citron (Etrog) trade. Returning to my mother's homeland, this work confronts personal and collective trauma by documenting an ancient agricultural collaboration that challenges dominant Western narratives about Jewish and Arab identities. The film traces my investigation of this forgotten symbiosis, where Jewish religious needs and Arab agricultural expertise created centuries of interdependence.
Through this methodology of deep research and material transformation, I create works that function as a form of archaeology—uncovering hidden narratives embedded in places and organic matter. Each project becomes a meditation on how environments shape identity and how art can illuminate invisible threads connecting local phenomena to global patterns of movement and change.
