Maya Attoun

Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Artist statement

My installations typically encompass a variety of media, including drawings, prints, sculptural objects, ready-mades and sound art. Drawing is often at the basis of my initial gesture. My work reflects on modernity through the mirror of the 19th century. I use meticulous drawing technique in order to deconstruct the image into technical steps in time. I am using the grayness of pencil as a visual silence, which helps to identify forms which lay in the intersection between myth, Symbols and language. I developed my studio practice when I took two objects and placed them one next to the other and watched them create new connections with time. It was as if the boundaries between these objects disintegrated and a new syntax was created. It taught me how our mind functions and how everything is interconnected. We are living in times of information, rather than times of knowledge, yet I believe that images hide ancient knowledge within it. Drawing and printmaking has its own rhythm, it requires surrendering to the process paste, of deconstructing the image into technical steps in time. The black and white color plate helps me to bring to front the hidden knowledge which I find intuitively in the image, and most important to blur the time zones from which the images were taken. I place a great emphasis on site specific installations. Working in a given space at a given time counteracts the transition from working in the studio to the installation, rendering it one continuous...

Artwork