Anat Keinan’s works- drawings, prints, woodcuts, installations, and sculptures- lie between the worlds of two and three dimensions. Keinan is fascinated by architectural spaces and the objects they contain and is interested in examining how people experience them. By intervening in the built sphere, she aims to influence the viewer’s interaction with it.

Keinan often chooses to create site-specific works that relate to particular spaces. Her artistic strategy consists of breaking up the architecture of a given space, and the reconstruction process forced viewers to reexamine their surroundings and experience them anew.

At the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Keinan emphasizes the relationship between the artificially staged wildlife scenes and the building’s architectural characteristics. As she notes, the museum presents the dead wildlife as a series of stages, lifelike images- carefully planned natural scenes. Keinan is interested in understanding this encounter, or clash, between the living and constructed, and the way in which the line between them becomes increasingly blurred as wild nature is gradually integrated into the architectural space.

Keinan is attracted to the museum’s transitional spaces, such as a window leading to a staircase or a terrace overlooking the various floors and corridors. These are the places where she chooses to display her works, as they echo the shapes and transparencies characteristic of the museum building and bring to the fore its “forgotten” and habitually overlooked areas.

2019