Adina Bar-On creates live performance works that place her body as the primary means of communication, locating it between the personal and the political, but always putting forward its raw materiality – facial expressions and breathing, voice and text, movements and postures.
A. Bar-On began her artistic experiences in 1973, during her studies at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (1970–1974), performing a sequence of physical and mental states of presence. After graduating, she was introduced to the local art scene through invitations to perform by pioneer sculptor Yitzhak Danziger (1916–1977) in 1974, and by leading curator Yona Fischer in 1975. Her participation in the “Meitzag 76” and “Meitzag 78” performance events in Tel Aviv, curated by Gideon Ofrat, stylistically located her amongst Israeli artists already identified with performance art. During these years, she also performed in youth centres, Kibbutzim and private homes, to expose her works to audiences outside the artistic milieu.
Throughout the 1980s, A. Bar-On began expanding her performance language to large scale multidisciplinary and collaborative events that included objects, props and designed environments, such as Another Place? (On Getting High) (1986), performed at the Israel Festival. She found various forms to emphasise the autobiographical, for example, involving her husband, children and students in Woman of the Pots (1990), while explicitly reacting to the Israeli social-political reality in works such as Salute (1983), created following the outbreak of the Lebanon War (1982) and performed at the Tel Hai 83 Contemporary Art Meeting, or The Green Line Searches for a Stage (1988), presented at Bougrashov Gallery in Tel Aviv to mark one year of the Intifada (1987).

During the 1990s, A. Bar-On established an additional creative path in video and sound installations that reframe and translate segments from her early works to other mediums. In the current millennium, A. Bar-On returned to accentuating the presence of her body as the central generator of meaning and experience in works such as Home of Course (2002–2007), Disposition (2001–2010) or In-Between (2018–2019), which she performs in private and public spaces.

A. Bar-On has been teaching her exploratory and creative methods since the 1990s in the leading art institutions in Israel, such as Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (Jerusalem), the School of Visual Theatre (Jerusalem), Camera Obscura (Tel Aviv) and the Holon Institute of Technology (Holon). She is also regularly invited to present works at international performance festivals and to teach at art schools around the world. In 2021, she was awarded the Dizengoff prize for plastic arts by Tel Aviv Municipality, and the Landau Prize for Arts and Sciences in the category of performance art by the Israeli Lottery Council for Culture and Arts.

A. Bar-On is a body artist in the most profound sense of the concept; she has formulated her performative language into a unique inner grammar that has become the most precise, even absolute, mode for understanding the transformations in her works over the years, demonstrating her insistence on maintaining the body as her channel for an immediate and unmediated encounter with the spectator.