Adina Bar-On is the pioneer of performance art in Israel, even before this medium had a name and an identity. Bar-On began her lifetime project 45 years ago, as a student of Bezalel Academy, in the department of Fine Arts.

The fact that she is the “last survivor” of her generation who is still working exclusively in this medium lies in her understanding that performance art isn’t only a clever way to break conventions.

Adina Bar-On has a great role not only in the birth moments of performance art, but cementing its place in the Israeli art world, creating an informed and interested audience that is growing in recent years, and in bringing performance art to the recognition it receives today: An active, central medium, with a new generation of interesting creators.

Adina Bar-On is an original, groundbreaking artist, a “one-woman medium”, as Adam Baruch wrote about her to mark the publication of Idit Porat’s book Adina Bar-On, Performance Artist (Published by Hakibbutz Hameuchad and the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001).

Her great contribution to performance art and to the language of performance focuses on the way in which she moves and awakens subtle and deep emotions in them with the essence of her voice, movement, and a minimal amount of props. In her work, the viewer goes through a mental process that requires their internal reflection and leads to a sobering gaze on themselves and their environment.

On the other hand, Adina is committed to the locality: The Israeli landscape, the aspects of physical geography and the human geography which distinguish the place in which we live.

She does not only possess a deep understanding of the artist’s role in society, but also actively deals with artistic expression of local conflicts.

Teaching, for Bar-On, is an inseparable part of being an artist. She has been teaching for many years in higher schools for the arts: Visual art students, dance, digital media, acting, and theater. Teaching, to her, just like her choice of performance art as a medium, is a search for the way in which communication works. Out of this perception she teaches, raises, and enriches many students who follow her, some of them even working in performance art.

In the past three decades, she is often invited to countries in Eastern Europe and East Asia – Who deal in many ways with questions of survival, territory, art during states of war and crisis, the central and the peripheral, ethnic and national conflicts, and many other issues that also occupy Israeli society.