Mapping is a means to represent, organize, and mediate a space. In Empty Spaces Tal Shoshan addresses questions pertaining to the representation of space by using road maps. She subtracts everything from the maps which is not a road – the topographical signs and architectonic reference points. Shoshan uses the surface of the map to discuss the mapped space as representative of the “other” place, as she calls it. Its otherness is manifest in the fact that it is an unfamiliar, foreign place reachable by practical implementation of visual signs. The artist”s relation to that “other place” is ambivalent: ostensibly one may pave his way thereto by reading the map, but the maps presented are fragile, and the representation of the terrain in them is annulled. The map which is supposed to represent a means of orientation, elicits uncertainty and instability; it transforms into an exposed body of sorts, a collection of small blood vessels.

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