Congratulations to Orly Sever, who lives in Kibbutz Kabri, and Maria Saleh Mahameed, who lives in Ein Mahel, for being elected to Artport’s summer residency program for 2020.

Maria Saleh Mahameed (b. 1990, Umm al-Fahm), lives and works in Ein Mahal, and is a graduate of Oranim College. Mahameed exhibited solo exhibitions at the Herzliya Museum, Maya Gallery, Tel Aviv, the Jerusalem Artists’ House and the Umm al-Fahm Art Gallery. She is a winner of Young Creator Award from the Hecht Museum, University of Haifa and the Oranim College Excellence Award.
Charcoal is a major element in Mahameed’s life and work, for she was born and raised in Umm al-Fahm (the mother of coal), where she began her artistic practice by expressing emotions through charcoal. Her work refers to her complex identity in terms of nationality and religion that reflects the world which surrounds her. Her art is influenced by personal and family events, politics, as well as daily life and the society in which she lives. After several formative events in her life from which her works have emerged, she continues to explore the world of life and death, and explores more deeply her personal identity, between her life in Umm al-Fahm and Kiev, her mother’s place of origin.

Orly Sever, born in 1976, lives and works at Kibbutz Cabri, a graduate of Hamidrasha Faculty of Arts (B.ED) and Bezalel Academy of Art (M.FA). Sever has exhibited numerous solo exhibitions such as at Herzliya Museum, Petah Tikva Museum, Haifa Museum, Line 16 Gallery and more. Winner of the Culture and Sports Minister’s Award for 2017.

Sever’s works are usually defined as site-specific installations and are based on the relationship of the work and space that contains it. Through formalistic sculptural research that creates paradoxes within the space, she tries to reach biographical experiences and raise questions about issues of identity and place. Sever works with burdened materials as the very encounter between them and intense physical activity creates new space. She creates situations where there is tension between a geometric, minimalist shape and a soft, pouring, seductive material that gives the shape an organic, almost animalistic texture. This tension also exists in the materials she uses, essentially industrial materials but with amorphous properties.