MAYA ZACK - DECRYPTION
Now on View at Ramat Hasharon Gallery for Contemporary Art
Decryption
Curated by Ravit Harari
Maya Zack's work deals with documentation and memory, the accumulation of evidence, and the actions Zack performs on alleged findings from fictional archives. The preoccupation with historical memory is intertwined with the private one and motivated by zack's family history: the loss of her father's family in the Holocaust and her mother's death from an illness when Zack was a young woman of 20. In her current exhibition, "Decryption," the artist presents a new body of work consisting of video, drawing, and installation works, which continues her preoccupation with memory, in the loss and the fading image of her mother, this time by stepping out of the archive corridors and seeking to articulate the memory entangled in the body and its organs: a memory that is moist, steaming and breathing, capable of being emptied and filled, wilting and regenerating - like the body itself.
The film "The Annunciation" (screened in the inner space) is the most personal of Zakc's video works and the first since the artist became a mother herself. It deals with the attempt to hold on to memory - and at the same time with the willingness to let go of it and examines the physical and spiritual intergenerational transmission between mothers and daughters. The film's name refers to Rachel, the famous Hebrew poet, poem - "At Night Comes the Harbinger", which describes the visit of the angel of death to her when he came to inform her of her death in battle. As a child, Zack's mother recited the song to her ears in a voice full of pathos, and the words - which took on an almost prophetic meaning after her untimely death - were engraved in her body and were the gospel that burned and scorched in her flesh.
The memory inherent in the female body, or the memory of another body, involves aspects of pregnancy and birth. The film opens by looking at an old photograph of Zack's mother as a young woman and in a documentary-like attempt to decipher her forgotten figure. It continues with actions of cutting and shearing, which accompany the film throughout and resemble surgical operations. First, Zack cuts out her mother's fingers from the old photograph. As if seeking to penetrate beyond the front of the photographic space and give it depth; To penetrate the mother's body and merge with it, in order to be reborn as an adult, separate and whole. At the same time, on a surgical table in what appears to be a laboratory, Zack picks out lines of letters from a sort of damp placenta of words, cuts out, and reassembles Rachel's words from them. The packet of words she received as a spiritual inheritance from her mother turns into a genetic inheritance in the film, a code that can create a new body - flesh and blood. It's not for nothing that the words came from a bag whose skin was milky and almost transparent, a thin cut as if in a cesarean section giving birth to moist words.
The film is accompanied by a drawing installation using the protege technique, creating a space between a bathroom, a purification chamber, and an operating room. Zack stretches white sheets of paper over household objects intended to wrap or contain a single human body. She transforms them using the frottage technique into empty envelopes blackened with graphite, which contain evidence of the objects' previous existence in the world; as if they were dry skin peels, slough which carries traces of the body once wrapped in it. The objects move on the axis between creation and disappearance, between birth and death: bathtubs that look like containing wombs, open graves or sarcophagi, a stainless steel work table that looks like an autopsy table, the voice recorder placed in front of it compares to the appearance of a gravestone, a single bed whose skin has been stripped from it and replaced by a thin paper shell. Zack merges baptism, purification, and regeneration with death, thus also implying the act of art: the act of creation is like a gathering inside a womb or a coffin - a womb that gives birth to death (or eternity).
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