Homelessness—both geopolitical and conceptual—is a major hallmark of our postmodern, globalized era. In a few cases are problems of home, homeland, longing, belonging and displacement more pronounced than that of Israel-Palestine.

Art created in and around this land, or lands, naturally often reflects these issues. Among these, performance, installation and video works by Israeli and Palestinian women artists may merit special notice. Over the past three or so decades, a disproportionate number of women artists in these genres have hailed, both in the region and internationally, for groundbreaking work. For instance, the organization Artis, arguably the leading and most progressive site for information on experimental Jewish-Israeli work, has, from its inception, tended to feature more women working in performance, installation and video than men. Further, Palestinian women artists, in general, tend to outnumber men in terms of works shown in the West. Thus, any discussion of installation and performance work in the region is likely to concentrate largely on women, regardless of theme. In addition, much work from the region focusing on nationalist notions of homeland is deeply enmeshed with motifs of home in its most literal sense, as domesticity. However, essentializing that tie may appear, these artists consciously raise feminist issues concerning the difficult, conflicted and unsung work of women in building and maintaining homeland, traditionally, while also grappling with otherwise traditionally male-coded duties of nations at war. Here I will briefly discuss representative pieces by two leading progressive artists of the region, one Jewish-Israeli, the other Palestinian-American: Sigalit Landau and Emily Jacir, respectively.

Sigalit Landau, born in 1969, has long been prominently featured in Israel and Europe. Since her 2008 solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art, she has also become known in the United States, and represented Israel in the 2011 Venice Biennale. Her work largely concentrates on motifs of shelter. For instance, her 1994 exhibit Tranzit, in a space within Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station in which homeless Palestinian workers had been living, consists of elements including a number of doors she had hacked through with iron replicas of hands, a tarpaulin tent and a structure in which a number of belongings left behind in space were compressed as if into a vertical sandwich.