NEIL BELOUFA This Exhibition by Neïl Beloufa (*1985) Was Amazingly Staged
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NEIL BELOUFA This exhibition by Neïl Beloufa (*1985) was amazingly staged. The frst part was in front of the Schirn’s main entrance and freely accessible from the street during opening hours. Visitors were encouraged to sit on one of around a dozen long pink foam-flled rubbery supports to look through a medieval-style visor onto vertical screens on which young members of the military from various countries talked about their lives and loves in video chats with the artist. Surrounding them were sculptures that stopped just short of faux-goth robotic fguration, as well as some ropes literalising the idea of interconnection. Upstairs, in the second part of the exhibition, the soldiers’ stories were woven together into an “art fction” video, set within an installation of Plexiglas and aluminium that forced the viewer to approach by going to and fro, as in an airport security line, before reaching the screening space. Here, the audio recordings sometimes overlaid videogame replays or acted scenes, mixing commentary and narrative; at one point, visitors saw the chat column of the artist’s Skype interface, where he explained the project was “about how militaries (not Hollywood) present themselves”. This layering and openness multiplied the questions in play, rather than reducing the project to a mission accomplished. Globalisation, as we are so often told, shrinks distance. So why is war so often treated as remote, even though we hear about it all the time? But that was not really or only what Beloufa’s exhibition was “about”, which was much more various: love and youth and technology and workout culture and self-representation and patriotism and cultural conditioning and the future and who the audience is and how everyone is connected and wants to be loved and some people are closer to death than others. One of the most affecting aspects of the show was, however, its formal design, which came across in the emphasis on looking, as the third act made clear. This was when viewers entered the round indoor balcony overlooking the rotunda, where they could look down onto the vertical screens and see others watching and listening to the videos below. Behold the spilled-open panopticon, the surveillance society from the fipside, the tourist/art-viewer’s gaze and projection onto the cultural fgure of the soldier. “I grew up very sheltered and joining the military I have met all different people from around the world,” one of them opines. Differences elide. It’s too self-centred to think it’s about me and you, though in some sense it is, and we too are part of an enormous machine that only sometimes lets us see our place within it. Scrimgeour, Alex. “Neïl Beloufa at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.” Spike, October, 2018. reviews From top, clockwise: “Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art” GarageTriennial Neïl Beloufa Paulo Monteiro Installation view at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2017) Courtesy Garage Museum of Russian of Contemporary Art, Moscow Photography by Alexei Naroditskiy Contemporary Pejman Foundation / Tehran Tomio Koyama and Misako & Rosen / Tokyo Garage / Moscow Paulo Monteiro Art “The outside of distance” Installation view at Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2017) The inaugural edition of the “Garage Triennial When Neïl Beloufa agreed to inaugurate Minimal art can elicit feedback far beyond Courtesy of the Artist and of Russian Contemporary Art” borrows a the Pejman Foundation’s future home, artists’ expectations. Paulo Monteiro’s Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo representative model of Soviet all-union art located in a former industrial building in two-gallery exhibition, titled “The Outside of Photography by Kenji Takahashi exhibitions. It attempts to speak for the whole downtown Tehran, currently undergoing Distance,” serves as an example. Among the Neïl Beloufa country by bringing regionally produced art reconstruction, one of his conditions was works shown at Tomio Koyama Gallery, all Installation view at to the capital, asserting itself as a conduit for that the renovation should remain unfinished produced in the last two years and all untitled, Pejman Foundation, Tehran (2017) international exposure. This posture is even throughout the exhibition. In this way the the epitome of Monteiro’s art is a series of Courtesy of the Artist and Pejman more pompous given that the majority of the artist continues to deconstruct political small oil-painted wooden blocks running Foundation, Tehran artists discovered on the curators’ lengthy and economic systems, contesting their horizontally along the wall. The ends of each research trip were already known to their embedded hierarchies and contradictions. block are painted in colors that contrast with local publics. Since the term “national art” Visitors are welcomed by a large that of their main body: pink and orange today presumes a form of institutionalized metal grid over the main façade, along juxtaposed with light blue, and so on. They induction into the global art market, it comes with a colorful collation of mundane, are paintings with minimal composition as as no surprise that the concomitant exhibition rationalized objects comprising rebar much as they are sculptures with little volume is a potpourri of eye-catching artworks and resin. Perceiving a triptych of light — their diminutive stature calls attention that calls to mind a commercial art fair. boxes through the grid, we read “Yum” in to the space they fill. By contrast, a small, Yet in order to avoid anarchy or graffiti mode. A consummate disruptor thirty-by-forty-centimeter oil on canvas nominalism, the curators have attempted to of conventions and stereotypes, Beloufa consists of a yellow mound in the lower half group this mess into seven uncompromising erases hierarchies of high and low, of apparently applied over a pale blue ground, “vectors.” By this subjective selection and respectable and popular culture, elevating visible through a single vertical scrape of taxonomy, as well as a rationale full of local scraps from the factory floor and elaborating pigment — an undaub, as it were — balanced art-historical references, these diverse sculptures inspired by domestic spaces. by a thick white streak along the top edge. practices have been subsumed under a Despite his feature-length film Occidental More than their color, form and meaning, the national tradition. For instance, it takes for (2017), which recently screened at the sheer materiality of paint stands out here. granted a continuity between such “master Berlinale, the artist’s filmmaking has tended to Monteiro wields Misako & Rosen’s figures” as Anatoly Osmolovsky, Dmitri challenge traditional displays of moving image temporary exhibition space as a compact Prigov or Dmitry Bulatov and younger artists within larger installations. The Analyst, the showroom for works, again untitled, dating today. The group of works entitled “Personal researcher, the screenwriter, the cgi tech and from 1990 to 2016. One wall comprises Mythologies,” which actually attempts to the lawyer (2011) is reinstalled here in-situ, works on paper; painted bronze bars undo the notion of “Russianness,” only projected upward through a stack of Plexiglas are mounted on another, along with succeeds in perpetuating this essentialist panels observable from four different floors. combinations of small canvases and mythos via works by “incredible craftsmen,” By contrast, a new work, titled Restored oil-painted wooden bars. The artist has such as Nikolai Panafidin’s entertaining (2017), looks at the codes underlying reality remarked that “distance has outside kinetic sculptures. The only vector that television. Filmed in a Qajar palace at Isfahan and inside,” suggesting something “transcends cultural references tied to and merging Iranian cultural references unfathomable about the distance between locality” is titled “Common Language,” with those of Western popular culture, the objects. Yet as seemingly abstract and but the lingua franca here seems to be work forces us to confront our orientalist universal as Monteiro’s concept is, these identified not with contemporary art as such expectations. Young Iranians dress and untitled works fit seamlessly into Japan’s but rather with new technologies: iPhones behave as they might in any other TV series diminutive living spaces, in buildings without (Zaurbek Tsugaev), corporate advertising while a voice-over calling to mind Barack numbers on streets without names. (ASI), VR glasses (Kirill Makarov), etc. Obama problematizes their actions. The Despite this initiative’s laudable intentions, decision to film in black and white distances such a straw man reveals the most the viewer and, in a way characteristic of its vulnerable aspect of the Triennial — that in auteur, veils the line between documentary withdrawing from global contemporaneity, and fiction. In an era increasingly defined it only further provincializes Russian art. by post-truth, this exhibition couldn’t feel more relevant in place and time. by Andrey Shental by Martha Kirszenbaum by Satoru Nagoya 102 — may 2017 vendredi 02 . 03 . 18 [Critique] « Discorde » ou l’art du chaos Par Sinziana Ravini omment navigue-t-on dans un monde redevenu manichéen après que le mythe de la �n de l’histoire cher à Francis Fukuyama s’est dégon�é ? Un monde où tous les mouvements, qu’ils soient de gauche ou de droite, féministes ou sexistes, républicains ou religieux, sont en train de se radicaliser et de prétendre dur comme fer qu’ils détiennent la vérité ? Quelle est à présent la di�érence entre le bien et le mal, et quelles sont les forces qui parviennent C à écrire ou réécrire l’histoire de cette di�érence ? Le Palais de Tokyo vient d’ouvrir ses portes à une série d’expositions spectaculaires sur les plus grands combats et confusions idéologiques contemporains. L’une des plus impressionnantes est L’Ennemi de mon ennemi, conçue par le Wunderkind du monde de l’art français Neïl Beloufa, et son Virgile, le commissaire d’exposition Guillaume Désanges, connu pour ses nombreuses expositions à la fois narratives et conceptuelles.