Exhibitions

Meirav Heiman focuses her attention on the gaps between the ideal and the concrete, the virtual and the real, the personal and the anonymous, aiming to subvert the fantasy of the consecrated institutions of marriage and family. In most of her works she uses accessories, stylized design, grotesque elements, humor, and exaggeration in an attempt to simultaneously convey familiarity and alienation. In her words, she is interested in "rituals that have become mechanical and in distorted body language, which intensify feelings of loneliness and disconnection."

Between March and May 2020, the Israeli government declared a "state of emergency" to handle the threat of a new, little-understood epidemic. A series of restrictions were imposed, including physical policing, isolation, and social distancing. The new norms entailed by the coronavirus crisis began to seep into public life, like the virus itself.
This exhibition presents works by a group of photographers, created in response to the new way of life forced on the public.

It is surprising to find that virtual space is in fact based on ancient cultural principles. A strange space, with no taste or smell, wind or sun – a binary space made up mostly of combinations of the numbers 1 and 0, that we experience through a bright screen, as if peering through a "window". Still, this "environment" is based on the same mathematical principles that underlie our perception of space and the science of perspective as they were developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The illusion of a familiar space that functions according to familiar laws conceals the reality of a virtual environment, in which our body has no existence, and neither do our physical experiences or specific viewpoint.

"Well-behaved women seldom make history," contended historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1976, and feminist discourse enthusiastically adopted this statement. From its beginnings feminism sought to liberate itself from binding social mechanisms, by means of groundbreaking practices meant to subvert a reality of silence and compliance and replace it with one of speech and protest.

Much has been written on the subject of feminist solidarity, as a formative value that provides the political subject with a secure base from which to promote social struggles in various arenas. The concept of "solidarity," in its various meanings, has served in recent years as a framework for discussions in the feminist community. The call for solidarity is based upon the demand to dismantle supposedly competition in relations between women.

This exhibition seeks to examine the symbolic representations of women in the context of oppressive power mechanisms in the contemporary global age. These representations are often considered in contemporary feminist thought, which seeks to change fundamental structures in the relations between the sexes. This contemporary feminist approach is based on a radical critique arguing that the man/woman dichotomy legitimizes the socio-political disempowerment of women.

The trans-feminist movement addresses feminist issues from a transgender perspective. Similarly to other third-generation feminist movements, trans-feminism often examines the effect of body image and the oppressive and destructive power of the binary gender conception.

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.

In this exhibition, a common thread connects between miniscule, prehistoric clay figurines dating from 8,000 years ago, found at the Sha'ar HaGolan archeological site; medieval images of women inspired by Tarot cards; and the works of four contemporary Israeli women artists.

This exhibition explores the world of the hybrids as an alternative existence reflecting the fluid, unstable, and complex identity of woman in the contemporary cultural discourse, as described by prominent feminist thinkers such as Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway. In this context, the idea of the "nomad," used by Braidotti, is another name for the feminine.