Maya Zack. Outlined absence

Maya Zack 
Outlined absence 
video, drawings

September 30 - October 31, 2014
Taiga Creative Space 
In the framework of the parallel program of the European Biennial of Contemporary Art Manifesta 10 

curator: Maria Veits
organized by Creative Association of Curators TOK организатор: Творческое объединение кураторов ТОК 
supported by the General Consulate of the State of Israel in St Petersburg

Exhibition design: NERPA architecture  workshop

The exhibition ‘Outlined Absence’ analyzes the mechanisms of collective and personal memory and explores the intersection between individual recollections and historical events.  In Judaism the imperative “remember” is highly essential and in addition to its religious origins, it has strong social, cultural, and philosophical aspects that played a crucial role in developing the collective consciousness. For Maya Zack, therefore, the theme of memory and strategies of its shaping appear to be the central in her art work. Another subject that reoccurs in her videos and drawings is human attempts to impose structure on reality in order to cope with its chaotic nature. Hence in the works included in the exhibition there are so many various mechanisms that aim to organize reality - bureaucracy, science, art or memory – that are represented through the images of archives, documents, notes,  drawings and photographs.

‘Mother Economy’ video presents a personal strategy for developing an alternative kind of memory, which does not passively reproduce the past, but rather reworks and reinterprets it. We follow the actions of a lonely housekeeper navigating through the domestic space in order to find traces of family members. Her activity turns into a traditional systematic ritual, measuring every object and action into a numeric value that only she can understand.  Being very accurate and precise, the measuring and calculating processes become for the woman an attempt to protect herself from the traumatic memories and distant herself from them. The film is a meditation on Holocaust remembrance and an homage to resourceful women during violent periods of political upheaval.  

In ‘Black and White Rule’  the artist touches upon the concept of reality as a construct and our endeavors, often vain and useless, to make it obey to us. The work is built upon the dichotomy of chaos and order: on the one hand, there is unpredictable living environment and on the other, a scrupulous attempt to document and structure it.   Two poodles obey the orders of their trainer  in a chessboard-like space while their actions are being monitored and registered by a female clerk through the camera-obscura. After a while, the viewer looses the understanding of what comes first – the actions of the dogs or of the female researcher; is she documenting their behavior or manipulates it?   The thin line between the real life and dream,  representation of reality and its creation becomes very vague when the training process goes out of control. In the work Zack also traces the connection between such practices of capturing the reality as drawing and video. Her large-scale drawings depicting the film characters measuring various objects appear both in the video and the exhibition space, again raising the question about how our perception of reality is constructed.