Maya Attoun: Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts

Curator: Karmit Galili

Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art inaugurates Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts, the first solo exhibition of multidisciplinary artist Maya Attoun in Sweden, curated by Karmit Galili, Director of Magasin III Jaffa. From November 26, visitors will encounter Attoun’s rich lexicon of images consisting of alchemical symbols, tarot motifs, and playing cards, digits, and characters—an iconography that blends together literature, music, pop culture, science, and technology.

Maya Attoun (1974–2022) was a Tel Aviv-based artist who worked with sculptures and installations, sound and video art, and drawing. The exhibition was first hosted in 2021 at Magasin III Jaffa, the permanent satellite in Tel Aviv/Jaffa, Israel, established by the Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art in Stockholm.

In Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts the viewer encounters an imagined world where areas as disparate as mysticism and history, science, and popular culture are placed side by side. Maya Attoun saw her artistic practice as a part of the gothic tradition which does not distinguish the beautiful from the terrifying. She was interested in man’s intermittent catastrophes and sculpted from the products of man, that which surpasses him in magnificence. Attoun was a multidisciplinary artist, working in sculpture and installation as well as sound and video, with the same assurance with which she drew.

The exhibition takes the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 as its point of departure. It was the most powerful volcanic eruption on record in hundreds of years and caused worldwide climatic anomalies: the sky was overcast by a volcanic dust that blocked sunlight, black rainfall descended, and temperatures plummeted, to a degree that the year following the eruption became known as the “Year Without a Summer.”

During that non-summer, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his lover Mary Goodwin (subsequently known as Mary Shelley, after the two had married), and John Polidori, gathered in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva. While there, they entertained themselves by writing horror stories. Mary Shelley penned the story that would become the basis for Frankenstein (1818), considered the first-ever novel in the genre of science fiction.

Out of this climatic-cultural moment which places on the same level the natural and supernatural, humanity and monstrosity, the earthly and sublime, Maya Attoun built a cosmic landscape that runs on a time scale of its own. The catastrophic landscape Attoun created echoes the volcanic eruption of 1815, but relates just as much to a future tense, here on earth or on another planet. A catastrophe whose circumstances remain unclear; it is a landscape that carves out a circular time dimension within the space, projecting the shadows of the past onto the future.

Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts consists of three bodies of work, all executed in graphite. The solar mountains—Solar Plexus—resembles solar panels and reflects the meticulous and incessant work of the artist. CRY—CybeRnetic Year, an animated work produced through the systematic erasure of a drawing of a basketball; resembling a celestial body the projection fills up and empties out in regular intervals of 24 minutes and 24 seconds. In the exhibition’s eponymous series of drawings, we encounter Attoun’s rich lexicon of images consisting of alchemical symbols, tarot motifs and playing cards, digits, and characters—an iconography that blends together literature, music, pop culture, science, and technology.

Maya Attoun (1974–2022) was a multidisciplinary artist, engaged in a dialogue between thought processes, intuited gestures, materials, and images. Her work encompassed a variety of media that included murals, drawings, prints, sculptural objects, ready-mades, and sound. Through these she reflected on modernity, history of popular culture, and the intersection of myth, narrative, and science. Attoun was a lecturer at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, the Multidisciplinary Art Faculty, Shenkar College for Engineering and Design, and at the School of Visual Theatre.

For press information and images, contact Lisa Boström, Head of Communications at bostrom [​at​] magasin3.com.

On view fall 2022/spring 2023
Focus: Lawrence Weiner
November 18–June 17, 2023

In the Eye of the Beholder
November 18–June 17, 2023

Elective Affinities
November 18–spring 2023

Maya Attoun: Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts
November 26–June 17, 2023

James Lee Byars: The Path of Luck
November 26–June 17, 2023

In the entrance area: Meriç Algün: successes, failures and in-betweens
November 18–June 17, 2023

In the art library: Jill Magid: Foreign Body Ingested
November 18–spring 2023