Attacks on Linking
2008
Exhibition Cataloge
“Attacks on Linking” is the title of a large-scale solo exhibition by the artist Michal Heiman, presented at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2008. The title is drawn from the well-known 1959 essay “Attacks on Linking” by the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. The essay addresses psychic mechanisms that attack the capacity to form connections between thoughts, emotions, and communication.
Heiman employs this psychoanalytic concept to examine the art arena as a “crime scene” and to investigate the possibility (or impossibility) of creating new connections—political, gendered, and aesthetic. The catalogue includes texts by the curator, the artist, and additional contributors.
- Design: Michael Gordon
- Editing: Mordechai Omer
- Texts: Mordechai Omer, Michal Heiman, Michal Ben Naftali, Omri Herzog
- Language editing: Einat Adi
- Copies: 500
- Pages: 198
- Type of binding: Hard cover
- Languages: Hebrew, English
- Dimensions (cm): 21x29
- Printing: Offse A,B, Ltd, Tel aviv
- Binding: Keterpress Enterprises, Jerusalem
- Type of printing: Offset
- Publication: Tel Aviv Museum of Art
- Place of publication: Israel
- Book photography: Leafing Magazine
Michal Heiman (b. August 11, 1954, Tel Aviv) is a multidisciplinary artist, a researcher of photography and archives, a curator, theorist, and an activist for the rights of women and minorities. She is a fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and teaches at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design and at the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School.
Over the years, Heiman has received numerous awards, and in 2010, she became the first recipient of the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography, awarded in collaboration with the Israel Museum. In 1997, she represented Israel at documenta X in Kassel—one of the most significant exhibitions in contemporary art—where she first presented The Michal Heiman Tests, an ongoing project (M.H.T. 1–4) based on procedures drawn from psychoanalytic testing and used as a critical tool to examine gaze, power, gender, and moral responsibility.
In 2015, she founded the organization Women in Academia, which works to advance gender equality at Bezalel. In 2018, she established Academia Shela (“Her Academia”), an initiative addressing sexual harassment, abuse of authority, and related harms, while promoting women and minorities within art institutions and academies.
Heiman does not define herself as a photographer, but rather as a “refuser of photography.” She describes photography as inherently bound to trauma, a position that has led her to propose a new understanding of the photographic medium. Her work has been exhibited widely in international museums and exhibitions, and she has published influential theoretical writings on photography, trauma, and visual testimony. Heiman is considered a central figure in the development of critical artistic discourse in Israel and internationally since the 1990s.
