Ayelet Carmi and Meirav Heiman: Bliss – trilingual

Written by Timna Seligman and Dafna Satran

Women, nature, homeland, and the fragile Israeli reality lie at the heart of two video works by Ayelet Carmi and Meirav Heiman: Bliss (2025) – screened for the first time – and Zahara (2021), in its museum premiere. Despite being very different, both videos offer visions of a parallel world, one that seems to be familiar, though not of this time and place. They conjure up a dystopian universe, a world that comes in the wake of an existential trauma and yet aspires to create a new utopia.  

Zahara is based on the tragic story of Zahara Levitov (1927–1948), one of Israeli’s first military pilots. The film reimagines what happened after her plane crashed in Jerusalem’s Valley of the Cross, as she and an older woman make their way through modern city streets to the old Shaare Zedek hospital, where Zahara succumbed to her injuries. In Bliss a group of women escape an unknown calamity to create a new communal life in tune with the seasons and cycles of nature, building a human column that takes shape before our eyes.   

Together these works exemplify the conceptual world of Carmi and Heiman: an archetypal female world that bases itself on larger-than-life historical figures while presenting ordinary women with whom anyone can identify or empathize. The exhibition also connects to Anna Ticho (1894–1980), who has attained the status of the mother of artists in Israel. It is interesting to read Carmi and Heiman’s works through the prism of Ticho’s drawings of Jerusalem and of women. Her aging women of wisdom resonate with Carmi and Heiman’s videos. Amid Ticho’s portraits, their contemporary explorations reflect the cultural and historical landscape of Jerusalem, bridging past and present.