Shaked Aviv’s exhibition Heterotopy: False Impression, deals with imagined internal landscapes and the creation of illusionary landscapes and events, in combinations that are non-existent simultaneously in known space. In spite the sometimes sugary colors, her expressive paintings span between morbid, shuddering childhood memories that scared her soul, and her ambition to bond to harmonious internal landscapes, as fracture and healing and hope to re-experience, as a mother, her ‘second childhood’.

The image of the swing moving without an actual foothold over a body of water, is repeated time and again in the exhibition, and like the pendulum, moves representing significant periods in her life, between here and there. Like the images of rubble faded in the passing of time, representing a jolting transition of conscience from mythical time and place, to familiar ones.

Aviv strives to achieve ‘Utopia’ – an order devoid of existence in the material world – yet apparently the combination of material and imaginary landscapes, in an ‘excessively pink’ palette, she achieves results more befitting Michel Foucault’s definition of ‘heterotopy’: “a locus or other space, detached from normal space challenging its actual existence.” A space that is at the same time material and mythical, physical and imagined. These are marginal locations establishing suspense and a borderline experience, a penetration into spaces absorbed with passion, coercion, purification or sin. A place opposed to the material, the conventional, presenting some sort of alternative to it. An Ex-territorial location: a ship (stable space) moving through a boundless chaotic space (sea).” According to Foucault, “similar to the mirror’s operating mode simultaneously creating physical and imaginary existence of the self, so does heterotopy connect recognized physical space with and anomalous imaginary space emerging in it undermining it”. In another place in his essay he discusses the concept of emplacement defined by him as proximity between dots or elements; “in a formal manner, these relationships can be defined as series, as trees or as thickets. (Azulay, A. (2003), in: M. Foucault, “on other spaces”, Heterotopy, Tel Aviv: Resling, 7-20; 61-74).*

The principles of location and reversal, discussed by Foucault, are present in the exhibition both in the series presenting trees or thickets of unfamiliar plants, as well as the selection of imagery such as ruins, ships sunk or sailing in these or other bodies of water. The water functions in her work as a mirror enabling simultaneously material and imaginary existence; walking in them for purposes of ritualistic bathing and purification such as the “Mikveh”, but also an arena of pondering, flow and free choice. Locations that the artist must cross to position herself on the axis of belief.

Aviv’s large expressive oil paintings combine and assemble into a “collage” exotic trees and thickets from worldwide photographs that she assembled into imaginary landscapes, with auto portraits, situations and significant persons from her life. She often carves models in the layers of oil, serving her as camouflage nets or screens that even though they have formal commonalities, scar the paintings’ as if it were a substitute to tormented human skin.

Aviv’s work reflects phantasms in a palette of enchantment, as well as mysterious unresolved situations occurring under the grottos, cliffs, thicket and screen. The images’ probing, searching gaze exposes the fact that time and again, apparently, the landscapes of the soul unite with the thicket of moments of charm.

*This text was written while Foucault was at a conference in Tunisia in 1967, and was published posthumously without authorization. See: M. Foucault, ‘heterotopy’, Encyclopedia of the ideas.

Shaked Aviv is a young artist, graduate of the art department at Emuna – Israel’s largest college for art and education, and an MA in creative art from Haifa University. She recently started studying towards her PhD at Bar-Ilan University. She teaches art at the Avni institute in Tel Aviv, at Talpiot college in Holon, at Emuna college and Bait VaGan in Jerusalem. Many of her paintings are part of private collections. Artist’s website.