VENICE
Merav Shinn Ben‑Alon
2023
Artist Book
An artist book that is a hybrid of an art catalog and a graphic novel. An object rich with images and materiality featuring a wide range of drawings, collages, and oil paintings from three decades of creation, focusing on the body, sexuality, vulnerability, eroticism, and feminism. It is the story of a young woman, an art student who is sexually assaulted while visiting the 1986 Venice Art Biennale.
The book consists of five chapters. Each chapter is constructed within an erased art book of one of the great masters.
The narrative text (English/Hebrew, opening from the left) is located at the bottom of each page, forming a sequence that connects its various chapters and replaces the customary curatorial text.
The images’ presence dominates the majority of the book, covering some of the layers, conducting dialogue of beauty and resistance with each other, and building a morbid and multifaceted relationship with the visible and erased texts in the book.
By the unfolding of gender motif over three decades of work, the enduring presence of trauma is revealed. It is an act of reclaiming in a way that builds an artistic mechanism striving to reveal the 'truth' while confronting Western cultural representations of power: the man, the artist, the curator, and the teacher.
The editing process juxtaposes iconic works with works that were destroyed by the artist or never exhibited, collapsing the chronological timeline. An object of a new form is constructed, creating an enigmatic, unsettling, non-linear reading/viewing experience that is unresolved.
- Design: Dana Gez
- Editing: Merav Shinn Ben-Alon, Shoham Smith
- Texts: Merav Shinn Ben-Alon
- Translation: Gilah Kahn-Hoffmann
- Language editing: Rachel Perets
- Copies: 750
- Pages: 160
- Type of binding: Hardcover
- Dimensions (cm): 29 * 23 סמ
- Reproductions: ArtScan Studio, Sharon Bentov, Youval Hai, Avraham Hay, Merav Shinn Ben-Alon
- Printing: A.R. Printing Ltd.
- Binding: A.R. Printing Ltd.
- Type of printing: Offset
- Publication: Self Published
- Place of publication: Tel Aviv
- Supported by: The Israel Lottery Council for Culture & Arts
- Book photography: Yair Meyuhas
- ISBN: 9789655985047
Merav Shinn Ben-Alon, born in 1965, lives and works in Tel Aviv-Yafo. Shinn Ben-Alon holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and an MA degree from the Interdisciplinary Program in the Faculty of Arts at Tel Aviv University. Shinn Ben-Alon works in various mediums, including drawing, painting, installation, and writing. In her works, Shinn Ben-Alon strives to express emotional content through minimal means and deals with the topics of gender and trauma while commenting on muted social narratives.