Maya Zack – Counterlight

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MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch is pleased to announce Counterlight, Maya Zack’s second solo-show in the gallery following her 2012 exhibition; now the artist presents her latest video realized this year which concludes the trilogy started with Mother Economy (2007) and then Black and White Rule (2011). A series of drawings and collage also accompany the video.
Maya Zack's artistic research develops through various media – video, installation, drawing, photography, sculpture – and explores issues connected with the elusive and fragile characteristic of memory, of time, and history. In this wide-ranging exploratory journey laced with many artistic and cinematographic citations and historical references, Maya creates her personal interpretation of reality in an attempt to reconstruct, reorganise and control it. The result is a complex narrative which creates a recognisable and distinctive language in her work.
The female protagonists of the video trilogy enact solitary and apparently unconnected actions in parallel with an ever-more insistent rhythm in their attempt to measure and classify reality which they obsessively record. Visually, the videos are set indoors, in archives or domestic ambiences dominated by the presence of sheets of paper dissected with almost scientific precision. Aimed at capturing and decoding reality, the protagonists’ actions construct in the minds of the spectator an image of both the present and the past through a new declination of memory.

The video Counterlight, which is also title of the exhibition, was first presented at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in April 2015, and focuses on the poet Paul Celan, whose ouvre develops a unique testimony of the suffering and horror that he experienced and forms a complex discussion on the representation of memory. Celan's thought led Adorno, following an intense epistolary exchange, to rethink his initial position, which denied the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz, and to state: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream” [Negative Dialectic]. The video, metaphorically set in the inner of a bellows camera, is presented like a surreal physical and mental journey into the poet's past, evoked by a woman archivist who reconstructs the fragments and memories through writings, photographs, papers and photographic negatives. Read more

Maya Zack (1976, Israel), artist and filmmaker, lives and works in Tel Aviv. Since 2008 she has been teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem. Among the solo show: Counterlight, Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv (2016); Outlined Absence, Manifesta 10's parallel projects, Taiga Space, Saint Petersburg (2014); The Shabbat Room, Jewish Museum, Wien (2013); Living Room, The Jewish Museum, New York (2011); Made to Measure, Galleria Marie-Laure Fleisch, Rome (2012); Mother Economy, The Jewish Museum, Media Center Gallery, New York (2011). Among the group show: Das Kapital. Schuld – Territorium – Utopie, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2016); Bibliology, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2015); Back to Berlin, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel (2014); International Photography Festival, Israel (2014); The Drawingroom, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck (2014); The 3rd Moscow International Biennal for Young Art, Moscow (2012); Pluriel-Regards sur l'art contemporain israélien, Villa Emerige, Paris (2012); Magic Lantern, Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2011); Heimatkunde (How German is it? 30 Artists' Notion of Home), Jewish Museum, Berlin (2011). She received important aknowledgments and awards: Isracard and Tel Aviv Museum Prize for Israeli Artist, 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.