Negotiating Dystopia, 2012
(a collaboration with Reem Bassous)
In this installation, Maya Portner collaborated with Reem Bassous to create an imagined city loosely based on the city-scapes and plans of Beirut and Tel Aviv. The exhibition space was transformed with a process that questions the boundaries of drawing, through direct application on the wall, layering, cutting, burning and forming paper in relief. The material processes of cutting and burning paper are a metaphor for the physical destruction in a city amidst conflict. Similarly, salvaging the remnants of cut paper and negotiating from them a new image, is itself a method of creating a city-scape from the fragments of the old. Coming from diverse artistic backgrounds the two artists find overlap in their foundation in drawing and their commitment to process. Artistic collaboration is a way for them of understanding each other and reconciling differences in each of their aesthetic, conceptual and cultural points-of-view.