Maya Zack

Installation: paper, wood / dimensions: 300400200 cm
Installation views: Ticho House, Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2009

Paper Work installation is dealing with order, control and with information organization, being disrupted by chaotic happening taking place in an office/archive space; a wave of yellowish paperwork is bursting out of a book-shelf and is growing into a three-dimensional territory, becoming a topographic map and a concrete piece of landscape almost.
Paper Work installation, is inspired by those piles of papers that surround us, that we endlessly keep reading, categorizing and filing. It also relates to the tension between territories located in the concrete reality and office-spaces where crucial decisions regarding the very same territories in the outside-world are being
made.

Exhibition catalogue text by curator Ronit Sorek:
Maya Zack exhibits the installation “Paper Work” in of Dr. Ticho's study. In it, she depicts an office space that has mutated, with smooth sheets of paper growing wild and developing into a peninsula- or continent-like forms. The sheets over flow the bookshelf Zack has built, onto Dr. Ticho's desk, from which they spill onto the floor. Stacked on one another, they create a three-dimensional topographical map
The installation is inspired by J. L. Boges's short story “ On Exactitude in Science”,(1) which describes an empire where the art of cartography has developed to such a degree that the map of the country covers its entire territory; younger generations, understanding the futility of such a map, reject it. In Zack's work, the question of the relation between description and its object is made tangible through the size of the paper sheets, which is identical to the size of the objects that they over flow. (2) the inter-generational tension animating Borges's tale is also felt in Zack's work, with the paper straying outside its allotted space and threatening to sabotage the existing order – specially , the order of Dr. Ticho's study. The paper's loss of control also allude to the powerful hold bureaucracy has on our lives, becoming our master instead of serving our needs. The multiple empty pages suggest the deluge of information in the era of the “global village”, prompting us to ask whether such information still carries any meaning.

1
Jorge Luis Borge and Adolfo bioy Casares, “On Exactitude in Science” in collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Press, 1998), p. 325
2
The French thinker Jean Baudrillard designated as “hyper-reality” those models that replace reality itself. He referred, for example, to the blurring of boundaries between daily life and reality as it is shown in the media, which sometimes create the reality they are supposed to document.