Ohad Meromi “Worker! Smoker! Actor!”
Nathalie Karg
This event has ended.
Nathalie Karg Gallery presents an exhibition of new work by Ohad Meromi. In this show, Meromi continues his preoccupation with the interplay between gesture, space and community, exploring through sculpture and video the relationship of play and labor, the political potential of
making, and the possibilities of the body as a complicated locus of submission and action.
In the video Worker! Smoker! Actor!, Meromi combines architectural vignettes and stop-motion sequences with live footage taken from his “Rehearsal Sculpture” participatory workshops. The video follows a cigarette factory worker from her post at the assembly line, to her local supermarket,
to her home, and later, when she gets ill, to a vacation resort where she joins yet another kind of productive assembly line. The placards included in the video use excerpts from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s “Biomechanics,” (1922) an actor-training method that imagines a utopia where the boundary between work and performance, work and play, is eliminated.
Splitting the space is Half Modular Dome, a rounded screen developed by Meromi to facilitate performative practices in his workspace. Smaller sculptural work on display are Metop #1 — a concrete relief depicting a worker at an assembly line; Sunbathers, a series of small custom-made
block arrangements of figures at rest; and sculptural works from Meromi’s Gravediggers series, inspired by Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit (1930) which describes the horrors of Soviet total collectivization.
Media
Schedule
from July 10, 2014 to August 15, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-07-10 from 18:00 to 20:00