Ilana Salama Ortar

Born 1949 in Alexandria/Egypt.

Ilana Salama Ortar is a visual artist and researcher in Civic Performance Art. With a Ph.D. at Roehampton University, London/Great Britain 2008 and a MA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Israel, 1986, Ilana Salama Ortar creates performative installations on forced displacement: uprooting, refugeeism, immigration and exile, with a focus on/in zones of conflict (war, occupation, ghettoisation). The work uses encounters with the public to explore the effects of their experiences through video, sound, drawings, paintings, and architecture. Projects include Pareidolie, Marseille, 2016; IMéRA, Aix-Marseille 2015 Foreign Body, Symposium; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel. Encapsulation, one Person show, 2013–2014; MP13 Marseille, European Capital of Culture, Laissez Passer, 2013.

Ilana Salama Ortar has been a research fellow at LAMES, associated at l’Université d’Aix-Marseille (AMU), at MMSH (Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’homme), 2015; visiting professor of art at ESADMM (École Supérieure d’art et design), from 2012 to 2013 in Marseille/France.

She has received fellowships from IMéRA, Aix-Marseille 2015, as well as the Camargo Foundation, Cassis/France, where she will be dedicating herself to the culmination of Foreign Body, a two-year series of workshops exploring body and spoken language of elderly women immigrants in Marseille.