| Michael Hakimi is a Berlin-based artist and Simone Neuenschwander is a curator at Kunsthalle Basel. Hakimi’s exhibition Roof will be on view there until mid-November. Simone Neuenschwander: Many of your works have an abundance of abstract forms and ornaments that remind one of cultural, political, or daily signs. They appear in your pictures as well as in the computer graphics or paper works. What signs are you interested in particularly? |
|
Michael Hakimi is a Berlin-based artist and Simone Neuenschwander is a curator at Kunsthalle Basel. Hakimi’s exhibition Roof will be on view there until mid-November.
Simone Neuenschwander: Many of your works have an abundance of abstract forms and ornaments that remind one of cultural, political, or daily signs. They appear in your pictures as well as in the computer graphics or paper works. What signs are you interested in particularly?
Michael Hakimi: In my work I come from the question: What exactly is a picture? How exactly does it emerge, and what results from its possibilities for function and consequence? I try to approach the answers by investigating the internal contradiction of the picture, that it is an object and representation at the same time. I emphasize the point where the two-dimensional area opens itself into the third dimension, letting representation and meaning emerge. I construct forms and signs that let this semantic threshold become visible. It is about a type of switching effect where the spectator should become aware of his own activity of perception and its incessant meaning-production.
I try to accentuate this inner, constitutive contradiction as much as possible. This means concretely that the forms should appear as flat and literal as possible, but the pictorial space they produce nevertheless should stretch out as far and deeply as possible, and let the meanings emerging therein appear as symbolically loaded as possible.
For the moment I am interested in plumbing the narrative potential of basic geometric forms. For example a simple standing rectangle appears at first glance as architecture, graduates in an irregular yet contiguous manner, then finally emerges as a skyline—the contour of an entire city. And if one turns it 90 degrees, the result could be the contour of a ruin, architecture in a state of decay.
SN: You also develop larger installations in which you bring different materials as "Readymades" into the space. At the same time you draw certain formally reduced pictures with simple objects and materials, for example in Der grosse Ofen [The Large Oven], 2004, at the Hamburger Kunstverein. The work showed paper sheets surrounded with plates on a platform attached at a column, with T-shirts. It was an abstracted landscape of high blocks of apartments with satellite dishes, surrounded by a cloud landscape. Der grosse Ofen is connected to your observations of urban residential architecture made on a trip in Russia.
MH: It was a perspective of those huge, functionalistic urban areas that seemed to express a very general principle that could be transferred to all urban situations. Namely that city seems to mean basically that crowds of people get stacked, provided fo, and connected to each other in a planned functional structure. And the exhibition space is also connected this structure.
To show this connection pictorially, concretely, and atmospherically, I wanted to describe the exterior urban space in the interior of the exhibition space. I used the wall surfaces completely as picture planes in order to create a type of panorama. The picture elements were abstracted and distributed in a rudimentary way. The strong material presence of the picture elements also inhibited the legibility of the picture—the risk being that the spectator could not produce meaning at all. The idea of a meaning being grasped while emerging then collapsing in on itself also connects to the idea of ruins.
It’s about manufacturing pictures that not only refer symbolically to an absent situation, but also (by stressing their objecthood and their locality), showing their involvement with the things and the space around them.
They are intended to make a concrete connection between the structural similarities of their placement and that which they are intended to represent.
SN: A certain seriousness and the impression of a latent threat is usually noticeable in your work, which evokes the negative sides of modernistic developments. How would you describe this "uneasiness" in your work? To what extent do your own personal observations or your own story play a role?
MH: It’s true—there is a seriousness, a dark mood. I think it’s the pictorial space itself, that can adopt immense volumes in which anything imaginable can be depicted and planned, that creates this seriousness, pathos, and uneasiness. The opportunity to design a form—and also of its immediate destruction, or erasing—with a slight gesture of the hand already implies the possibility of the catastrophic, perhaps like some type of dangerous magic.
The apocalyptic scenarios presented by the news media seem to confirm this as a complementary image, a documenting of all those possible disasters. This perspective is intensified in that I look through the lens of my origins—I have a vested interest in the events in the Middle East and especially Iran, a region that appears in the media as a permanent hot spot.
SN: Your new installation Roof contains, among other things, an abstract drawing of urban space with forms that reference advertising.
MH: The work Roof resembles Der grosse Ofen to some extent, except there are no house fragments or clouds, instead there are advertising billboards that stand on the roof, which is formed by the base of the room itself. However, viewers can only see the ads from behind—as silhouettes and the metal scaffoldings backing them. The “billboards” are the walls themselves—they are black, painted forms on the wall—so their scaffoldings seem to support the walls of the room and preserve it from the collapse.
In the exhibition space, in the picture and therefore on the roof, one is
protected from the appeal of the economy, though one stands, so to speak, on its back. Perhaps it is like the peace in the eye of a hurricane—a dead angle from which the suggestive signs are voided but nevertheless shape the view as mysterious monumental forms. The advertising-paved, high rise roof is perhaps a metaphor for a place that offers a niche for distant views to the horizon and the stars, and accordant sophisticated thoughts—but the platform that offers this perspective is a pure materialization of an economic calculation.
