Michal Heiman – BIO - 2023
Michal Heiman (she/her) (b. 1954, based in Tel Aviv) is an interdisciplinary artist, (art)ivist, curator, and theoretician.
She brings her critical voice to bear on issues of neglected histories and archives, challenging art and photography’s therapeutic potential and its role in the struggle for human rights.
Based on extensive research, her work offers alternative thematic, aesthetic, and theoretical matrices, often woven into the fabric of psychoanalytic theory. Working with case studies by renowned psychoanalysts, Heiman has presented several lecture films/performances: Father not Uncle (Freud/Katharina), based on a Freud case study with Katharina, Through the Visual, A Tale of Art that Attacks Linking (1917-2008), analyzing the British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s drawings and photographs from World War I, and Reality and Playing 1 & 2, based on a case study by the English psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, which since 2016 a part of the Winnicott Trust in London.
Heiman was a finalist for the Gravida Award in 2022 for her contribution to the psychoanalytic field.
She is a member of the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, founder of the Photographer Unknown archive (1984), creator of the Michal Heiman Tests (M.H.T.s)1–4, and the first winner of the Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in research in Photography in collaboration with the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 2010.
In 2023 she was appointed as the curator of the Tel-Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ virtual gallery.
In her last exhibitions, Heiman’s work has mainly focused on anonymous and marginalized women who were hospitalized in asylums in the 19th century. Using different tactics of infiltration and her own history, Heiman’s works are included in private and institutional collections worldwide.
Her works have been shown at The Jewish Museum (New York), Documenta X (Kassel), The Van Abbe Museum (Eindhoven), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), and the Museum of Modern Art (Saitama City, Japan).
Since 2019, she has had three solo exhibitions, Radical Link: A New Community of Women at the American University Museum at Katzen Art Center (Washington, D.C.), Hearing at the American Jewish University (Los Angeles), and Chronically Linked at Binghamton University (New York).
Recently, the Centre Pompidou added her installation, The Blind Triptych (2022), to their permanent collection.
In 2015, she founded the organization, Women in Academia, to protect and advance women’s equality at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.
In 2018, Heiman founded the public-benefit corporation An Academy of Her Own, which advocates for gender equality in academic art institutions.
Heiman has taught at numerous universities and institutions, including Bezalel Academy of Art & Design and Tel Aviv University