Maya Attoun is a multidisciplinary artist, encompassing a variety of media including murals, drawings, prints, sculptural objects, ready-made and sound art. She lives and works in Tel Aviv, and holds a BFA and MFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Today she lectures in Bezalel and in Shenkar College of Engineering and Design.
Attoun has exhibited solo exhibitions at prestigious museums and galleries such as the Jewish Museum, London; Marie-Laure Flisch Gallery, Rome; Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, as well as group exhibitions at the Center of Contemporary Art, Switzerland; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Sperchsaal Gallery, Berlin; Magasin III, Stockholm, among others.
She won multiple awards, including the Israel Ministry of Culture and Sports award for the arts; Mifal Hapais, Lottery Committee of the Arts; and ARTIS grant.
MIII JAFFA: Hi Maya How are you doing these days?
M.A: Hi, I suppose I’m fine.
MIII JAFFA: Tell us something about the work from Magasin III collection we see here.
M.A: The drawing is a self-portrait with a skull. The lightnings over the head of the figure are inspired by the internal system of blood vessels in the brain.
The work deals with the breaking of boundaries between the interior and exterior, or more precisely between the interior of the body and the interior of the home. It is part of an extensive search for wild landscapes in the domestic environment, and the possibility of a new body, a mutation of the home and body.
MIII JAFFA: Do you experience this artwork differently in these days?
M.A: The work is part of a thought about the interplay between the interior and exterior, and about home as the last wild place that is actually left, when the outside environment is disciplined and regiment. On the one hand, the isolation experience of these days is a direct continuation of this thought. On the other hand, this thought takes into account the act of isolation, turning our back to the exterior, as a subversive, anti-establishment action. But in these days, the act of going outside is portrayed as a subversive, anti-establishment action that also endangers the self.
MIII JAFFA: What are you working on right now?
M.A: The isolation caught me at the height of my work on the exhibition “Solar Mountains and Broken Hearts”, that was scheduled for the end of May in Magasin III Jaffa. It took me few days to lower the work rate until it almost stopped.
I occupy my-self with short actions, drawings and photographs in the domestic space. Especially by playing with the sentence CULTIVATING DOING NOTHING IMPORTANT that wonders about the nothing. What is important and what isn’t and especially about this possibility that we are given, which is sometimes unbearable, to experience every day in full.
MIII JAFFA: Thoughts about the future?
M.A: As the days go by in quarantine, I’m coming to the realization that reality as we have come to know is constantly changing and requires us to rethink the future. It is a frightening experience of change, that breaks down any sense of social, economic and mental stability. There is currently a huge gap between the past and the future, so I try hard not to think beyond the next day, and not to draw conclusions too quickly about the future.
