MAYA ATTOUN

Maya Attoun's installations typically encompass a variety of media, including murals, drawings, prints, sculptural objects, ready-mades and sound art. Drawing is often at the basis of her initial gesture, setting the tone for a project and outlining its theme. As the initial drawing is “projected” onto the space, it acquires a spatial dimension, branching out to other media such as sound and three-dimensional work. As part of this expanding dialogue, in recent years she teamed up with other visual artists, as well as writers and sound artists, in producing collaborative work in the domains of sound, video and text. Further themes that stem from those additional media are introduced into the work, enriching the drawing and charging it with new associations.

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From the very start Attoun let herself be guided by nonlinear movements, knowingly summoning in various “disturbances” into her work – entanglements, knots, flaws, irregularities, folds, intersections and permutations that are disguised, on the surface of things, in ornamental patterns and a rigorous mathematical order. This work process has allowed Attoun to weave together art-historical styles, pop culture, scientific paradigms, literary genres and the personal realm of autobiography. 

Attoun have reworked a nexus of themes related to cultural history, modernity and the intersections of myth, narrative and science across a number of major solo projects. Several chief themes have been recurring in her work, appearing and reappearing in various media and constellations: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, knot theory, science fiction and the Neo-Gothic.

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Each of these themes resonates differently, calling on its own peculiar field of cultural and historic connotations. Attoun tries to fuse and intersect them in different and unexpected ways, in what she have come to call hypertextualization in art; a term she devised to reflect how we interact with visual and textual data – how we encounter it, process it and react to it, and how data continuously thrives to command an ever-growing virtual and mental space.