Maya Attoun

Born in Jerusalem, 1974
Lives and works in Tel Aviv

Meital Katz Minerbo

Born in Jerusalem, 1974
Raised in Karakas, Venezuela
Lives and works in Tel Aviv


Larva

Larva is a fictional figure, the protagonist of Maya Attoun and Meital Katz Minerbo's collaborative work The Artist and Dr. Weiss (2012). She is a young artist who creates experimental video and installation works, and explores the popular, spiritualist, and social aspects of the Gothic sensibility. Larva comes to see Dr. Weiss, a hypnotist, to treat her creative block, and undergoes a metaphorical and emotional crisis. She is subsequently reassembled as a Frankenstein-inspired creature (in this context, see Maya Attoun's interest in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein). This work takes the form of a shadow theater inspired by the world of Gothic imagery. Accordingly, the setting is Strawberry Hill, the neo-Gothic pastiche villa constructed by Horace Walpole - a politician, scholar, architect and writer, who significantly impacted the development of English neo-Gothic culture in the late eighteenth century.
Larva was born of a collaboration between Maya Attoun and Meital Katz Minerbo - a single entity composed of their similar and different parts.