Maya Zack
Maya Zack (B. 1976, Israel) is a visual artist and filmmaker. Through exploration of various media types and technology, such as films, drawings, 3D visualizations and spatial installation, Zack ties together themes of memory, history, documentation and reconstruction.
Her work addresses humanity's attempt to impose order and structure onto reality as a means of coping with its inherent chaos. Mechanisms of order - bureaucracy, science, art, and memory - are central to her practice and are represented through images of archives, offices, documents, equations, writings, and visual forms like drawings and early photographic techniques, such as the camera obscura. These mechanisms often take on an exaggerated, almost absurd appearance, exposing their futility as they lose direct connection to reality, producing only distorted reflections or fictionalized versions of it.
Zack’s protagonists—rigorous, obsessive, and often desperate—navigate meticulously constructed spaces, handling objects and performing tasks that reflect an unwavering reliance on these mechanisms. For her characters, these systems become the only tools available to grasp and reconstruct reality.
Through this process, Zack reflects on the complex relationship between memory and history. Her work develops an "ontology of the sign and the trace," driven by a near-obsessive focus on objects, sites, and invented procedures of memory and documentation—what she describes as her own “science of memory.”
Zack is a senior professor at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. Her work has numerous film and art awards, including the Landau Science and Arts award by the Israel Lottery Council of the Arts/ Isracard and Tel Aviv Museum Prize for Israeli Artist/Uri Orbach Award for Jewish Culture/ Idud Hayetzira Prize –Israeli Ministry of Culture/ Adi Prize - Adi Foundation and the Israel Museum Jerusalem/ Celeste Kunstpreis Berlin/ Israel Lottery Council of the Arts/ CCA Tel Aviv.
Her works are included in prominent collections such as the Daimler Collection (Stuttgart-Berlin), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Jewish Museum Berlin, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Jewish Museum Vienna, ORS Doron Sebbag, and the Shpilman Institute for Photography (SIP, Tel Aviv).
Solo shows include: Hitbasrut, Ramat Hasharon Contemporary Art Gallery / Maya Zack, La Mémoire en Action Oeuvres vidéos, Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris / Counterlight, Tel Aviv Museum of Art / Broken Horizons, Petach Tikva Museum of Art / Counterlight, MLF Gallery, Rome / Memory Trilogy, MLF Gallery, Brussels / The Shabbat Room, permanent installation at The Jewish Museum Vienna / Manifesta 10's parallel projects, Taiga Space, St. Petersburg / Living Room, The Jewish Museum, New York /
Additional exhibitions at CUC Gallery, Berlin/ Galerie Natalie Seroussi, Paris / Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv.