Maya Shimony

Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel

Artist statement

The project’s starting point was media coverage of Hamas’ takeover of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in June 2007. Going into battle accompanied by photojournalists, Hamas fighters paused mid-battles to take perfectly staged photos, formulating a mythical narrative in real time. Curiously, all this was carried out using distinctly Western visual codes, seemingly at odds with the ideology of the fundamentalist organization. The works bring to the foreground the possible origins of these codes – from Renaissance frescoes and paintings, through Persian miniatures, to European Orientalism – to question the supposed dichotomy between clashing worlds. In the paintings, I bring together multiple temporalities and spatialities on the canvas. While at first they may seem of many times and outside of time, the paintings are always grounded in contemporary and my local reality. In a process of “reverse engineering,” I trace back their imagined origin, the visual language with which they were conceived, formulated, and disseminated. This brings to the surface the simultaneous presence of all these ideologies, meanings, values that continue to be at play in our world, even though they were declared dead a long time ago.

Artwork