Michal Heiman is the first artist invited to be part of the Curatorial Studies’ exhibition series Subject:Fwd:Unknown. In her lecture, she will talk about her practice, focusing on her most recent project, Radical Link , 1855-2019. The project began as Heiman came across a photograph, from circa 1855, of a woman in a London Asylum that bore a striking resemblance to her own adolescent self. This self recognition across centuries paved way to her proposal for a new model of 'Returns' and a new community – A New Community of Women, 1855-2019. Heiman seeks to envision the political, cultural, gendered and psychic conditions attached to this possibility of ‘return’. “We live amidst crises of displacement and flows of refugees” Heiman writes, “intransigent nationalism, people moving across borders and identities, fleeing, moving ahead, going elsewhere, and yet wishing to return; always wishing to return. And the right of return stands at the heart of many political debates. And Heiman asks “will we be able to forge a path to a ‘return’? Will the women of 1855 collaborate with the women of today, or will they object?” 

Over the past three decades, the artist, curator and theorist Michal Heiman (b. 1954, Tel Aviv) has studied erased or forgotten histories and their visual aspects, offering alternative thematic, aesthetic, and theoretical matrices. Heiman explores and questions photography’s ability to penetrate traumatic experience. Her strategies include intervening in existing spaces, archives, books, works of art, historical events and case studies. In recent years she has been seeking to contribute to envisioning the political, cultural, gendered, and psychic conditions of possibilities of 'return' with its numerous inflections, attempting to create a new model of ‘returns' and a new community of women. She teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and in 2015, she founded the Women in Academia organisation that protects and advances women’s equality in academia. The project Radical Link 1855-2019 is to be exhibited in Washington DC and in LA in 2019 and 2020 respectively.

The exhibition at fffriedrich opens 7PM, Thursday, October 18 in the Alte Mainzer Gasse. 4-6 and will remain open until October 28.