In 2012, Michal Heiman saw her younger self in an 1855 photograph by Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of a woman in the Surrey County Asylum (London). In 2017, Heiman encountered her own gaze in an 1880s photograph by Oreste Bertani of Maria Dominica D’Alberto at the San Servolo Asylum (Venice).
Struck by these moments of recognition, Heiman has created a new project in which she explores various tactics for re-entry into the nineteenth century and its asylums. She has produced her own checkered dress, resembling the one worn by the women in the Surrey County Asylum, where Diamond photographed his patients. She has photographed and filmed women, as well as some men and gender non-binary individuals, to be her fellow travelers through time and space. These individuals include family members, artists, human rights activists and attorneys, migrant workers, writers, professors of law and history, asylum seekers, Knesset members, psychoanalysts, an Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, doctors, security guards, poets, and curators. She has engaged some of these subjects to perform the role of asylum guards. And she has filmed herself and her daughter, sometimes wearing masks of other female artists and activists, infiltrating the former London and Venice asylums themselves.
In this project, Heiman produces her most generous and radical work to date, resisting institutional injustice, offering sanctuary to women of the nineteenth century and today, and inviting museum visitors to do the same.
- Sarah Gordon, Curator.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated book, including essays by curator Sarah Gordon; Sharon Sliwinski, Professor of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario; Prof. Orna Ben-Naftali, Rector of The College of Management Academic Studies (The COLLMAN) and the Emile Zola Chair for Human Rights; and artist Michal Heiman. Designed by Michael Gordon.