Lilac Madar: Poppy Pink in Central Park

Featured Project
PoppyPink New York [Rehearsal], June 2024, Participatory Performance, Central Park, New York, NY. Photo: Yonatan H. Mishal

Lilac Madar, best known for her photomontages and assemblages exploring feminist themes, turned to performance in the wake of October 7, 2023, as she began to grapple with mounting evidence of atrocities committed during the Hamas-led massacre in Israel—including the rape, sexual brutalization, and murder of women. Her grief made creation feel impossible—until a vision emerged: she was lost in Central Park, leaving a trail of pink thread behind her. PoppyPink, for her, is an act of remembrance—a body unraveling in real time, marking the absence and memory of the women violated and silenced. Named in part for artist Inbar Haiman (Pink), murdered at the Nova festival, the performance aims to affirm what art demands: to witness, to endure, to insist on presence. In this interview, we take a closer look at the project and its origins.

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Some last words on the Whitney Biennial as a cultural labyrinth

Opinion
Photo from the Whitney 2022 Biennial

I would hate to think I have become an old and conservative critic who believes our best days are behind us. I would rather believe that my structuralist perspective is capable of evaluating contemporary emerging practices and recognize the social, cultural and political value of these tendencies. What brought this on is having recently seen the 1962–64 exhibition at the Jewish Museum. This show examines how artists living and working in New York during this three-year period responded to rapidly changing social and cultural conditions, by questioning what was considered to be art’s normative forms and subjects. This post-AbEx generation was concerned with creating aesthetic configurations that would result in novel perceptual modes and political subjectivities.

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