Mild Atrophy in the Subarachnoid Space

Meirav Davish Ben Moshe’s works sketch the complex relationship between the personal and the collective, between political borders and the boundaries of the body. Jerusalem’s tangled fabric is stained and unraveled by the artist, transforming into a diseased organism. Bleeding, pulsating maps burst beyond the boundaries of the paper, vibrating, vulnerable. The transportation and street systems intertwine like arteries and veins, spreading like a virus into the empty space between the viewer and the painting, extending their metastases.

As a landscape architect, Davish Ben Moshe routinely studies and rethinks Jerusalem’s borders, traffic routes and infrastructures. As an artist, she articulates the impossibility of living in Jerusalem, in Israel—an existence which tries to normalize a threatening, violent situation, which is all but normal.

The series of works on paper, Vital Organs (2016-20), was drawn on 1925 maps of the streets of Jerusalem, purchased by the artist from the National Library of Israel, and on art and tourism maps of the city from 2019. Ostensibly objective, scientific objects, the maps are, in fact, a political tool, defining control over space, writing and erasing history, concealing silenced voices.

The jigsaw puzzle Another Land (2018-23) is based on maps drawn during the negotiations on the Oslo Accords, showing the alternative maps presented by the Israeli and Palestinian representatives, including the differences between them. An image of Moses in the bulrushes, extracted from an 1880 print by Gustave Doré, is seen in the background. The embryonic maps, reminiscent of Rorschach tests, transform into a jigsaw puzzle, with which viewers are invited to play, disassemble and reassemble. The playful participation furnishes the viewer, if only symbolically, with the ability to interpret the rift from his/her personal perspective, and try, in unison, to heal that which was cracked.

Davish Ben Moshe’s exhibition draws a line between the historical and the contemporary, between a dream and its dissolution, between utopian aspirations prior to the birth of a nation and the collapse of utopia. Its title, “Mild Atrophy in the Subarachnoid Space,” is a quote from a diagnosis obtained in a brain MRI. Atrophy is the wasting away or loss of body tissue due to cell degeneration. Here the clinical diagnosis becomes poetic, echoing the painful link between personal and collective anxiety, when the individual body and mind involuntarily reflect a national dystopia.

Maayan Sheleff