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MICHAEL HAKIMI
RESONANCE
Public Art Project

07.09. – 09.08.2009

Opening: Samstag 06.09.2009, 18 – 20 Uhr
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click the picture to launch gallery

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In October 2008 KROME Gallery – Art & Architecture opens its spaces on the Karl-Marx-Allee 82-84. The outside project "Resonance“, installed on the roof of Karl-Marx-Allee 82, was produced by KROME Gallery and marks, in addition to the gallery program, a series of interventionist artistic projects that deals with the cultural and architectural context of the Karl-Marx-Allee. 

The external installation by Michael Hakimi consists of silhouettes of Persian, African und Arabic drums. With their archaic form language, that refers to both the exotic repertory and the stalinistic architecture set in a central Asian scenography, the drums occupy the communicative space of western advertisement. At the same time they comment on the symmetrically designed “workers´ palaces” on the Karl-Marx-Allee.

In contrast to this illusionist representative architecture, the two-dimensional negative print of the drum cases creates a space for backward projection that raises the question of what culturally lies behind. Through the refusal of depth and concretion, the figures create a pictoral resonance in the beholder. A response in which the two cultural patterns of identification are dialectically melt together. The silhouettes of the drum cases expose the pompous superficiality of the potemkin facade.

The anthropomorphic, alphabet-like pieces simoultaneously caricature a relationship between subject and architecture and thereby the question of “housing” in a phenomenological and for everyone comprehensible sense.

From the outback of modernity the artist offers “a formalism... that claims neither the beauty nor the purity or the simplicity of the artistic process, but a quality that placed already the 20s Russian formalists in the fore: the alienation of our point of view respectively, that allows us to behold the images from behind.” (Ralph Ubl)

The project was realised in collaboration with Galerie Karin Günther, Hamburg.