Maya Attoun
Maya Attoun
My World is Empty
1:1 (18 drawings), 2019-2022, ink on paper, courtesy of the Maya Attoun Archive
Moonwalk (series, 12 etchings), 2019, courtesy of the Gottesman Etching Center, Kibbutz Cabri
Cry, Cry, Cry (six works), screenprint, 2021, courtesy of the Jerusalem Print Workshop
CRY (Cybernetic Year), 2021, video, 24:24 mins., courtesy of the Maya Attoun Archive
A delicate and fruitful web has formed between the members of the artists’ greenhouse at TAU Art Gallery. Maya Attoun’s sudden death tore that web, leaving us to search for ways to continue the dialogue, even in her absence. The conversations with Maya in the first few months of the greenhouse program revolved around her desire to marry graphic mythological-hybrid worlds with virtual reality technologies. She was fascinated by studies that draw links between conscious and unconscious visual perception, the relationship between language, knowledge, and sensory experience, and the potential for their constant disruption. The selection of Attoun’s works featured in In the Mind’s Eye was informed by this roadmap, in the attempt to trace the intersections between the domains she roamed, as well as her diverse artistic languages, which include ink drawing, graphite drawing in video, silkscreen print, etching, and aquatint.
Created between 2019–2022, these works unfold parallel worlds that intertwine fiction and reality, presenting new configurations that challenge our ability to decipher them. The journey among the different universes created by Attoun touches on the personal, internal, and intimate, but also soars towards the cosmos, celestial bodies, and the end of the universe. In these realms, vision does not bring us any closer to knowing, rather, it plays tricks on us, preventing us from constructing a stable image of the world, while also breathing life into it. The language of drawing lends itself to lingering and discovering a visual syntax that takes shape, produces meaning and breaks apart, repeatedly. This brings to mind Attoun’s description of her etchings as “moonwalking״: “Dancing where the dancer glides backwards but their body actions suggest forward motion.״ In her work, time blends and becomes a concoction of mythological past and unknown future.
Attoun’s ink drawing series, presented here for the first time on such scale, started out as a daily exercise to relax her hand while working on her 2021 solo show Solar Mountains and Broken Hearts at Magasin III in Jaffa. Alongside the exact pencil drawings in the studio, Attoun developed a freer and more open drawing routine at home. She drew in different situations and conditions, even while in pain, documenting her daily stream of consciousness and posting the outcomes online, in a conscious decision to suspend judgment of their quality. The Covid-19 pandemic, which forced most of the world’s population into self-isolation at home, breaking down known practices and systems, can serve as the background against which one might examine this powerful series. The images emerge out of the darkness, glimmers of light releasing them from the pull of gravity, from the control of the scopic field, and from the shackles of words. In the eye of Maya Attoun’s mind, a conversation unravels — silent, tearful, tumultuous, and understated, secure within the folds of her palm.
In her proposal for the artists' greenhouse, Attoun included the following quote by American science fiction author Philip K. Dick, from his lecture How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later (1978):
“So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms.(…) It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later.(…) However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. (…) I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe — and I am dead serious when I say this — do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perishso that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most ,the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.”
