The Blazing World*

When we try to imagine a world that is not based on Western gender conceptions we are in fact treading in the realm of science fiction; since we must imagine a society and a history entirely different from those we have known for centuries.

Defining the science fiction genre is an elusive task; however, one of its abiding principles is that it is based on scientific logic. The genre is often seen as masculine, yet in fact it was invented by a woman. In 1818, Mary Shelley published the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus. Over the years, particularly in the 1970s, with the rise of the second feminist wave in the U.S., many feminist writers have made use of science fiction in order to describe feminist societies that exist in a different social, sexual, and biological reality. The artists participating in this exhibition also propose different realities. They create representations of the landscape that seem to have been taken from another world, but in fact are deeply rooted in everyday life.

Efrat Galnoor attempts to subvert the Western landscape tradition, which is based on a single viewpoint of the bourgeois white male. She uses a color palette that is not "realistic," disrupts the sequence of the painting and the laws of perspective, and adds "bursts" of pigment. She wanders through the real and the painterly landscape, investigating it, and representing it using new means.

Na'ama Roth also engages with local landscapes, via the image of a palm tree, as well as the outdoor sculptures created by artist Batia Lichansky. Lichansky's monuments marking Zionist events dot the Israeli landscape. The palm tree, as well as these public monuments, have become a feature of the landscape, although both constitute foreign interventions (in fact, most of the palm trees in Israel were imported). Roth uproots them from the landscape of which they seem to be a natural part, transferring them to an intermediate space in which they exist between two and three dimensions, between matter and representation. 

Maya Attoun provides the exhibition's soundscape with her sound installation Duration (2018). The work is a recording of the duration of time it took the artist to create a drawing in her artist's book – a diary she published on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein. The disembodied sound is amplified, turning the museum gallery from a "quiet" space into a living, breathing, grating, itchy, and prickly one. 

Elham Rokni turns her gaze to the landscapes of her memory, as a child born in Tehran who arrived in Israel with her family at the age of nine. Her connection with Iran is based mostly on visual images taken from the internet. In her works she depicts fantastic scenes of mosques floating in space or existing in a flattened world of orientalist ornament that is at the same time feminine and Western. This is not a precise reproduction of rich Islamic ornamentation, but rather an abstraction existing solely in her works, from the perspective of a Jewish girl in Iran and a Western woman and immigrant in Israel. Rokni thereby creates a world of landscapes that are alien and familiar, fantastic and specific, simultaneously local and foreign.

* The title of the exhibition is based on the title of the first proto-science fiction novel from 1666, written by Margaret Cavendish