Orna Ben-Ami, Displacement and Memory : Iron Sculpture

An entirely new retrospective survey of the work of Israeli artist Orna Ben-Ami, including Ben-Ami’s monumental public works in cut and welded iron, from the early 1990s to the present day.

Ben-Ami first started to learn gold and silversmithing, at the Jerusalem Technological Centre, before studying sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC, between 1990 and 1992. From 1994 she became fully engaged in sculpture using iron as her principal raw material for her artistic expression. Throughout her work in iron, Ben-Ami expressed her feelings using welding, a primarily masculine art process, imbued with her own feminine instincts. She began expressing her personal memories, and later, she continued by expressing the preservation of memory, particularly the memories of transient and displaced peoples, be they refugees or migrants uprooting their lives in the search for a better and safer life in new lands.

Ben-Ami has presented her works in 45 solo exhibitions around the world, including 23 exhibitions in museums across the United States. In 2017, her exhibition "Entire Life in a Package", was hosted at the United Nations in Geneva and New York to draw attention to the global refugee crisis, focusing on refugees. In April 2024, she again presented the exhibition "Negative Positive" at the United Nations in New York, which told about the tragedy of the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. In these two exhibitions, she exhibited three-dimensional iron sculptures and combinations of sculptures attached to original news photographs of refugees and destroyed houses.

This retrospective volume presents more than 100 key artworks covering the major themes Ben-Ami has drawn upon since the early 1990s, including Jewish refugees from Europe post-WWII, Israeli’s displaced in northern Israel and around the Gaza Strip post October 7, 2023, and Palestinian refugees both within and outside the Gaza Strip.