Michal Helfman

Michal Helfman (born 1973 in Tel Aviv) is an Israeli artist living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel.[1] She is a multidisciplinary artist working in various disciplines including sculpture, architecture, video and drawings. In order to demonstrate the relations between the reviled and the hidden forces working within society and culture, she has developed an installation platform based on the back-stage front-stage structure of the theatrical stage as one,[2] which brings together simultaneously both the real and the symbolic.[3]

In her Installation Just Be Good to Me exhibited at The Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 2007, Helfman employed multiple disciplines and media, such us architecture, interior design, sculpture and drawing. The opening scene of the film, which was screened in the first room of the exhibition, shows Helfman herself dressed as a dancer (a variation of Edgar Degas' ballerinas) diapering her son in a nursing room as a life-size model in the midst of the desert.[4] The space is not continuous, or narrative. It’s an illusionary moment that begins like an ordinary home video and then goes elsewhere.