June 14 to July 2, 2015
334 Broome Street (between Chystie and Bowery)
New York, 212 334 5200

An illuminated metal sign that spells the word “CHANGE” hangs in the K. storefront. K., the alter ego of the P! exhibition space, has taken over the gallery from March through July of 2015. K., which stands for the first letter of the gallerist’s last name (Krishnamurthy), as well as the value of a thousand (in dollars), presents a series of shows that focus on critical questions in economics, art, and the production of value.

The fifth exhibition in this series, titled “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” was Michal Helfman’s debut solo show in NYC. Helfman, an Israeli multidisciplinary artist based in Tel Aviv, is known for creating works that involve dance as well as stage design, symbolically using the stage as a way to reveal what occurs behind it, in the backstage.

Here, the front space acts as a money exchange. The clerk (Mr. Krishnamurthy or other representatives of the gallery), greets visitors from behind a glass window. The visitor is obliged to interact with the designated clerk, who explains the exchange rates: only Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan, and Lebanese currencies are available for exchange in the rate of one to one. Any individual paper bill is exchanged for another paper bill, regardless of currency rates.

A beaded curtain — made of metal piping, Mediterranean shells, ceramic prayer beads, Hebron glass beads, plastic skulls, and walnut shells — connects the front space and the back of the gallery. In the rear, an entire wall is covered with a Jordanian woven black-and-white mat, while nearby hangs an acrylic-and-oil-pastel drawing on paper, titled One Dollar (2013). The drawing depicts an image of the pyramid that decorates the American one-dollar bill. This iconic symbol, adapted from ancient Egypt, traces the transition of empires. Egypt, one of the first nation-states is now a third-world country suffused with conflict and uprisings, while the U.S., a relatively new nation, is currently a powerful country that has great impact on the destiny of Egypt and other Middle East countries.

In the center of the room, two stools and a small table are a setting for a backgammon game, which includes dice that were created in Syria using a 3D printer. In conversation with an Israeli humanitarian who smuggles aid to Syria, the artist was able to secretly import these objects into Israel. Apparently, it is common that the back of exchange bureaus around the world is used as a smuggling point. Backgammon, a popular game played in almost every household in Israel and in surrounding Arab countries, was developed from one of the oldest games discovered in the city of Ur (in modern day Iraq). Similar games were common and identified in Egyptian pyramid drawings and from archeological relics of the area. On these Syrian dice the artist engraved the rephrased sentence “we will not forgive we will not forget” which is connected to the Jewish Holocaust and currently very much identified as the slogan for the hacktivist entities Anonymous. This game of luck and tactics correlates to the fortune of so many people, including refugees in the Middle East today. Supporting this notion is % (2013), an eight-minute choreographed video in which five dancers perform a recurring routine and represent the fact that one out of five people in the world today is displaced.

Finally, an abstract metal sculpture titled Attention (2015) is a human-size Minimalist depiction of a man with a rifle. The weapon points towards the glass window that connects between the front and the back of the gallery, and it is “charged” by a rubber band. Underneath one of the sculpture’s legs is a fold of stacked $100 bills, tempting the viewer to lean down and grab the cash. However, once the money is removed the sculpture loses its balance and the gunman shoots. This temptation is of course a trap as well as an allusion to the money at stake in politics and in the relationships between the U.S. and the Middle East. There is a constant flow of events that influence the future of war and peace in the region, many of which may occur off of our radar, and most of which involve the confluence of money and power.

The show’s title contains a cautionary alert: “I’m so broke I can’t pay attention,” brings these objects together to emphasize our personal responsibility. The title points at the economic crisis in the area due to ongoing conflicts — hence a struggle to survive. According to Abraham Maslow’s psychological pyramid theory, most fundamental levels of needs are at the base and include physical requirements for human survival (as food, water and shelter), while self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid and is achieved only after all other needs are fulfilled. As residents of today’s “empire” we have the capacity to pay attention and to make significant changes in the world. What is then our moral responsibility towards the various conflicts in the Middle East? What is our role, and what do we choose to give our attention to?

The post Change and Displacement: Michal Helfman at K. appeared first on artcritical.

April 12 to June 7, 2015
49 Delancey Street (at Eldridge Street)
New York, 212 219 0326

Walking into “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views,” recently at Callicoon Fine Arts, was like walking into a kids’ art studio where the adults have lost control — but much stranger. Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian, the three artists responsible for the visual cacophony, filled the gallery from floor to ceiling with a schizophrenic amalgam of sculptures, videos, and two-dimensional pieces that fluctuate between fantasy and nightmare. Despite the frequently bright and graphic nature of the works, the artists successfully maintain enough editorial restraint to hold the installation on the precipice of dizzying inundation, without ever falling over.

The Haerizadeh brothers originally met Rahmanian in Tehran, and then moved to Dubai to escape artistic censorship in Iran. In light of the recent controversy involving the United Arab Emirates prohibiting members of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and NYU professor Andrew Ross from entering the country, it might seem ineffective for artists to defect from one area of creative oppression to another. The act reveals the omnipresence of political manipulation that artists in the Middle East have faced for decades, which forces artists to find ways to challenge the highly congested political systems both locally and abroad.

The exhibition at first appears to be a playful free-for-all of image and text, and then reveals itself to be a darkly comical and deeply satirical critique of power, identity, sexuality, and culture. Long-stemmed amaryllis — flowers whose common name is Naked Ladies — grow out of a black-and-white, geometric path that snakes around the gallery floors and walls, and leads to a row of collages by Ramin Haerizadeh, hung low on the back wall. Each titled Rib Room (2015), the works feature fractions of images of women from fashion advertisements or art historical paintings with their bodies partially drawn back in with ink and pencil, and stamped labels that read phrases such as “PORK ROAST” and “SKIRT STEAK.” What could be interpreted as an objectification of female identity becomes part of a broader narrative critique of dehumanization by power structures. In two of Rokni Haerizadeh’s series, he paints on printed stills from YouTube videos and makes Rotoscope-like animations over top, adding animal heads and body parts to humans in protests and demonstrations.

Rokni pairs fable-like images, which melt in and out of clarity and painterly abstraction, with titles such as But a storm is blowing from paradise (2014–2015) and Subversive Salami in a Ragged Briefcase (2013–2014) that further enhance the works’ ominous tone. Rahmanian’s paintings and collages continue the thematic removal of identity through images ranging from tragically funny puns to celebrity defacements. In his series Rearview Portraits (2012), we see the backs of the heads of elderly white men in suits and a white-haired woman wearing a crown and pearls (bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II, though none of their identities is openly revealed). The portraits hang close to the ground or shoved into corners, as though they were put on a time-out for bad behavior.

The show’s installation occurred over a period of several weeks, during which time the three artists brought their own artworks, works by Etel Adnan, Hannah Barrett, A.K. Burns, Martha Wilson, and Rose Wylie, and a variety of readymade objects into the gallery space. Through the process of extending their shared work and living spaces into the confines of a commercial gallery, the artists present a good-natured dismantling of the conventions surrounding artistic autonomy; everything is presented as one holistic idea, as opposed to a group show of many separate but related artists. The collaboration has resulted in an immersive experience that is further heightened by the show’s many three-dimensional objects: sculptures inhabit the space as both autonomous objects and interventions with the gallery’s bureaucratic operations. In the back office, where the exhibition continues, the gallerists sit on pieces from Untitled (2015): white plastic lawn chairs with blue painter’s tape partially covering the form or extending it in strange, decidedly nonfunctional protuberances. Break Free II (2015), a fuzzy cat tower decorated with bizarre hoardings both analog and digital stands like an absurd sentry near the entrance. An iPad and an iPhone playing videos of the artists, the devices’ chargers, wind-up teeth, bungee cords, a plastic ear, and various other bits of everyday life make up just one of the installation’s several readymade compositions.

Saturated with layered cultural and art historical references that have been turned on their head through the artists’ contemporary reexamination, “I won’t wait for grey hairs and worldly cares to soften my views” creates new language through familiar signs. Imagine a car that has been crushed for disposal at an impound lot, and then expanded back to some semblance of its original form. All the initial information is there, but it has been translated into something entirely new. The collaborative, reconstructed visual lexicon enables the artists to use satire to criticize a humorless system.

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