Video & Performance Artist · Israel

Gil-li
Cohen

Gil-li Cohen is a performance artist working across public spaces, intimate interiors, and the emotional landscapes in between. Her practice places the body at the center, not as subject, but as instrument. Each work constructs a situation: a threshold, a pressure, a test of what the body can carry. Every project begins with a personal story, and then crosses into territory that life alone cannot reach.

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Works

באויר

באויר

The body between ground and sky, between presence and disappearance.

Moonstruck

Moonstruck

A body surrendering to something larger than itself — gravity, longing, the moon.

Hit Me Baby

Hit Me Baby

Testing the threshold of endurance — what we absorb, what we resist, what we ask for.

רחמים

רחמים

Mercy, compassion, the womb. The body's capacity to hold — and to let go.

Series — Cover Story · 2021

Cover Story

2021 · #1

Cover Story

The body as text, the skin as surface. A performance about what we present and what we conceal.

Cover Story

2021 · #2

Cover Story

The body as text, the skin as surface. A performance about what we present and what we conceal.

Series — Like a Jellyfish in the Sun · 2018

#2

2018 · #2

Like a Jellyfish in the Sun

The body adrift — soft, transparent, moved by forces it cannot name.

#3

2018 · #3

Like a Jellyfish in the Sun

Suspended between water and light, between effort and surrender.

#4

2018 · #4

Like a Jellyfish in the Sun

No bones, no armor. Drifting through the world without resistance.

Kapara

2017

Kapara

A term of endearment and sacrifice. Devotion on the border between love and pain.

Something on the Beach

2013

Something on the Beach

The beach as public stage. The private body and the open, indifferent landscape.

Touch Base

2013

Touch Base

What does it mean to make contact? Between bodies, between strangers, between need and response.

Ophelia

2012

Ophelia

After Millais, after Shakespeare. Between life and myth, surrender and beauty.

Holly Love

2012

Holly Love

Love as something sacred and consuming. The terrain between devotion and loss.

Hit Me Baby

Mazal Dagim Gallery, Old Jaffa · Solo Exhibition · 2025 · Curated by Nataly Tizanenko

Hit Me Baby installation view 1
Hit Me Baby installation view 2
Hit Me Baby installation view 3
Hit Me Baby installation view 4
Hit Me Baby installation view 5

A solo exhibition at Mazal Dagim Gallery in Old Jaffa, tracing the artist's fertility treatment journey. The work exposes the tension between body and emotion, pain and hope — a deeply personal narrative made public through performance, video, and image.

Press

BE106 — "Hit Me Baby: Between Body and Hope"

A review of Gil-li Cohen's solo exhibition at Mazal Dagim Gallery, Jaffa. The show opened June 5, 2025, curated by Nataly Tizanenko. Critics noted the raw intimacy of the work and its unflinching exploration of fertility, vulnerability, and the female body.

Like a Jellyfish in the Sun

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design · MFA Graduate Exhibition · 2018

Like a Jellyfish in the Sun — installation view 1
Like a Jellyfish in the Sun — installation view 2

A project consisting of five video works projected side by side. Each work would begin in turn — like a small performance ending just as the next one begins. The project speaks of a state of emptiness or sadness, and the search for reconnection: to place, to objects, to warmth found in random things that might fill that absence.

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Moon — Installation

A sculptural installation — a large sphere covered in body imprints suspended in space, walls marked with ink traces of the body. Viewed from outside through a storefront window, the work collapses the distance between public and private, between the lunar and the bodily.

Moon installation
Moon installation
Moon installation
Moon installation
Moon installation
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About

Gil-li Cohen is a video and performance artist born in Israel in 1986.

Her work sits on the verge of performance — creating situations in public spaces, testing her limits emotionally, physically, and mentally, using the camera as her stage.

Beyond video, she engages in painting, print, and installation art. Her practice is an ongoing research to find connection.

BFA — Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem, 2012
MFA — Bezalel, Tel Aviv, 2016–
Israel
Video · Performance · Painting · Print · Installation
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Contact