"Meirav Heiman"

Meirav Heiman focuses her attention on the gaps between the ideal and the concrete, the virtual and the real, the personal and the anonymous, aiming to subvert the fantasy of the consecrated institutions of marriage and family. In most of her works she uses accessories, stylized design, grotesque elements, humor, and exaggeration in an attempt to simultaneously convey familiarity and alienation. In her words, she is interested in "rituals that have become mechanical and in distorted body language, which intensify feelings of loneliness and disconnection."

Heiman's works engage mostly with the staging of human situations common in daily personal and family life. She manipulates these situations to exemplify and expose, by means of defamiliarization, the beauty, fragility, and wretchedness that we tend to overlook in our daily lives.

The endless search for warmth and domesticity is a recurring motif in Heiman's works. As part of the ongoing search for the domestic fantasy, she emphasizes the characteristics of imperfection that are part of this ideal. The home becomes an altar on which we sacrifice ourselves and our loved ones in the name of bourgeois values.

In the photograph series "Sister of Mercy" (2000), Heiman invited strangers she met in online chat rooms to be photographed with her in a variety of intimate domestic scenes. She met the volunteers for a single meal – at a restaurant, an empty apartment, or in her home. The degree of exposure in the photographs directly reflects the sense of attachment created during the encounter. In this series, the physical comfort and emotional calm that characterize the experience of the home are replaced by a sense of growing unease as the viewer realizes that strangers are sharing the artist's bed, bathtub, or a morning coffee in pajamas.

This theme continues in the video installation Gullet (2003). For the production of this work Heiman invited strangers to pose as a family and eat a meal together. The participants were asked to arrive wearing a specific color, and their appearance was stylized according to the set the artist designed. They shared a twenty-minute meal filmed in one take and were asked to refrain from speaking throughout the meal. The end product is played in fast rewind, with five monitors showing the meals simultaneously in a continuous loop.

The fictional families Heiman created present a spectrum of possible family constellations – from a traditional nuclear family consisting of a father, mother, and two children, to a family with two mothers, an aunt, and three children. The dramatization of the intimate scene becomes, in the words of curator Tami Katz-Freiman, a "hollow choreography that speaks of loneliness and disconnection […] each bite they take is a bite out of the utopian united family unit, the idyll is disturbed, and from moment to moment the meal turns into a collective feeding ritual empty of meaning."

The home is perceived as the essence of unquestioned security – for better or worse. Heiman challenges this experience by emphasizing the performative aspect of intimacy and family life. The sense of uncanny estrangement, suddenly turning the familiar into the strange and unexplained, undergoes another metamorphosis: the strange become familiar, then strange again.