MAYA ATTOUN

Das Neue Ende

wallpaper sticker and graphite, 2015

wall and window installationת The Artists' House, Jerusalem

 

 

 

Zionism’s utopian ideas infiltrate Maya Attoun’s Das Neue Ende. The installation is read as two pages of a book. In one, she reprocesses a new iconographic language previously identified .with “Bezalel,” echoing the style of E.M. Lilien, one of the school’s founders and teachers Lilien’s design and artistic vision represented the struggle between perceptions rooted in .modern, Art Deco, European culture, and the desire to create a new Zionist visual language ,In the other page Attoun inserts a reference from Theodor Herzl’s 1894 play The New Ghetto in which he expressed his fears of the social-cultural ghetto forced on the Jews; within it she .(combines a line from a song written and performed by Elvis Presley, In the Ghetto (1969 The installation demarcates a symbolic ghetto, which imprisons a formal encounter between .Zionist symbolism and popular culture.