Michal Cole is a British-Israeli artist born in Haifa, Israel in 1974 to parents who emigrated from Morocco. She works primarily with the mediums of photography, video, tapestry, sculpture, watercolour and uses money in her works.
Early life and education
After completing her service in the Israeli Defence Forces, Michal left Israel in the mid-1990s and travelled to Paris to take foundational art courses, while being homeless for a period of time. She settled in London in 1997, where she pursued her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design. While attending university she created a number of works in which she used fragments of real money. A group of bankers were interested in buying many of her works and ended up becoming inappropriately sexual in their language with her. After they gave her their ties after believing she was flirting with them, she used them as inspiration and materials for her 2017 Venice Biennale Pavilion of Humanity exhibition Top Gun. Cole later completed her Master of Art in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts at the University of the Arts London in 2013.
Artistic career
Textiles
In Michal Cole’s textile pieces Inferno, 2013 and Clamare, 2013, Cole referenced famous art pieces such as Sandro Botticelli's Mappa dell’Inferno and Edvard Munch's The Scream with lavish colours and cheerful compositions through textiles. She attempted to bring religious figurative paintings back to life through the more contemporary medium of tapestry that more accurately depicted current views and beliefs as a reflection of society.
Exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Michal Cole created a work titled Top Gun in the Pavilion of Humanity, which was made of tens of thousands of used men’s ties including those of men she knew and men who had either harassed her or her friends. The ties were strenuously tied together to cover the floor, walls, a fireplace, a sofa, a pipe, a mounted moose on the wall and a rifle which all encompass a traditionally masculine styled living room. Ties were specifically chosen as they represent a piece of clothing typically worn by men for historically masculine activities such as boardroom and workplace life, witnessing business deals, hiring employees, and winding down at a pub. Cole’s intention of the subject was to comment on the oppression of women that is more apparent under Donald Trump’s government than ever before; including issues such as the gender pay gap, sexual harassment and a predominantly male political office. The piece similarly spoke to personal inequalities that were apparent in Cole’s life, such as her being a victim of sexual abuse, serving mandatory time in the military where hundreds of cases of sexual assault are disregarded, and her grandmother being a child bride.
Michal Cole’s use of textiles has been exhibited in pieces such as After Caravaggio and Roses in a process where she replicated famous paintings and destroyed them before the paint had dried. The pieces were later transformed in to fabric textiles, which involved mapping out and recreating the paintings with materials such as Tibetan highland wool, Bikaner wool, Chinese silk and nettle.
Installation art
Mute-Ululation
Michal Cole exhibited a site-specific video installation at Ex Bazzi Gallery at the 2015 Venice Biennale’s Pavilion of Humanity titled Mute-Ululation. This work addresses Cole’s identity as a resident of England who is of Sephardi ethnicity. For this installation, Michal travelled to Morocco and Israel and filmed women’s mouths while performing the traditional celebratory ululation: a long, repetitive, high-pitched vocal sound that involves the rapid movement of the tongue side to side in the mouth. On three walls in a darkened room, the videos of these women assemble frame-by-frame until there are hundreds of mouths simultaneously performing the ululation at a loud volume. This work was used to showcase a unifying bond amongst women that transcends geographical borders, religions and ideologies, while empowering these women and showcasing their poetic happiness and expression. It similarly is a piece in which Cole grapples with her own identity as having significant elements of her life that are tied in Middle-Eastern and Moroccan culture while having adopted aspects of Western culture due to living in the United Kingdom.