SURENDER, SURENDER by NIKOLAI NEKH

[Brief note about the exhibition]

The work that composes this exhibition, because this is about a composition in space, leads us to reflect on the occupation of the gallery as a common space. A sort of shared condominium, fragmented and apparently connected by the symbolic value of the displayed objects: the photographs, the sculptures/scaffolds/bed frames, and a full-scale image, memoir of the experience and of a convulsing place, from a standpoint of the artist in a pool at a hotel rooftop over the city of Beirut. Nothing is left from the look over the city living a revolution, just an image of wellness, yet lonesome, printed on an outdoor vinyl that redefines the notion of presence, memory, and the way that communication can be a political and economic tool that decants for the observer a generic place that can be confused with any other. Just like the light of the images of the desirable apartments for rent that blur the gentrification of the place, its otherness, the social, ethnic, economic and identity differences that apparently attribute its wealth and cultural diversity. But that remains outside of the frame, without visual existence and thus without memory, regardless of the hierarchy of their distribution channels.
An isolated sculpture, composed of a model based on a styrofoam plinth and a photograph of a mold made of synthetic material, confronts us with an utopian model of a construction, which, like the sculptures/scaffoldings/bed frames, reveals in manual execution the labor dimension of work that constitutes a future memory of the project for a gentrification museum.

João Silvério - Exhibition Curator

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