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Interview with Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi

A month ago Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi – a new pop-up gallery showcasing Arab, Israeli, Islamic, Jewish, and Persian-themed contemporary art – had their debut show in SoHo. The opening featured Y Liver, a conceptual duo based in Paris and made up by David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni. It included vinyl wall texts, performance, video works and a triptych, and as an opening show it was as lively and provocative and it was promising signal of intent from Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi. The gallery was started by three friends – Fa’iz Marhami, Karen Bookatz and Noël Kurdi: a Palestinian, a Jew, and a Saudi/Kurd respectively – and recently Dossier talked to Bookatz and Marhami about their origin, their mission, and Y Liver in NY.

How did your collaboration come about?

MARHAMI: Going back to the very beginning, Noël and I met in an Arabic class at university. We were reunited just over a year ago when I moved back to the US from Paris at which point she introduced me to Karen. We’ve been together incessantly ever since.

BOOKATZ: Yes, we are all very good friends and in the past year we found ourselves sitting around talking about these types of Middle Eastern/religious issues. It was very organic when we’ve decided to create Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi back in May.

But, as you will see, we are all very different: I have a very formal academic background in art history and work at an architecture firm by day; Fa’iz works at a hedge fund, but has been doing freelance art consulting for years; and Noël also works in finance, but has a very pure interest in art. All of our different talents come together very nicely in the context of a gallery.

And despite being Palestinian, Fa’iz has always been enamored with Jewish culture. In fact, it was Fa’iz who found Y Liver (our first signed artists). He discovered them online, contacted them and eventually went over to Paris to meet with them and the rest is history, as they say. As for me, I have a strong academic background in Arab/Islamic studies, despite being Jewish. In fact, I did a sub-specialty in Islamic art and architecture in graduate school at Columbia and wrote my master’s thesis on Jean Nouvel’s Arab World Institute, which has served as a critical influence throughout my creative career. Also, from my studies of the Middle East, I understand its formal cultural distinctions – like how Persians are not Arab, which I find that people constantly (and annoyingly) confuse over and over again. As for Noël, she grew up in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, but all of her friends have primarily been Jewish for some reason and she’s always felt a strong tie to the Jewish culture. So I guess all three of us – for whatever reason – always felt this pull toward “the other.” Whatever the case, I think between the three of us we cover all of our bases, so no one can really ever give us shit!

Can you tell me about the opening show featuring Y Liver? You took the concept of the pop-up gallery one step farther by taking the show to the streets of Chelsea later in the night of the opening. How did that go?

BOOKATZ: The show was really an entrée to the work of two artists, David and Rugiada (Y Liver), whom you might never have heard of over here if we hadn’t done this show. Y Liver in NY was really the most obvious title to me and David – it was their New York debut and was intended to give people a little taste of everything. We had wall texts fabricated; we had pamphlets printed; we had David doing a live performance entitled, And Now that “The Six Million Jews Found Alive in Argentina” Are Mostly Dead By Now?, a riff on an old Lenny Bruce bit; we had two video screenings (one of which was constructed out of six months of Gchats between Fa’iz and David entitled, Ashemuslim Mice We Are); and we had a triptych of drawings. We have a lot going on in this show, but you can recognize some central themes, namely the manipulation and subversion of language.

And in true nomad fashion we did take the show on the road… and people loved it! But we realized that performance pieces are, well, special, so we decided to lessen the number to three for the whole week.

The headlines from the Middle East this week have been dominated by allegations of human rights abuses aimed at both Israel and Hamas, Iran’s nuclear program, and the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several years ago Francis Alÿs did a project based around walking through Jerusalem with an open can of paint tracing the borders set up by the 1948 armistice under the title “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Something Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.” In your interview on Interview Magazine’s website you say that when you visit one of your shows, “you’re not going to walk in and go, ‘Oh my god the Holocaust.’ We’re not into that. The work is humorous; it’ll be crazy, funny, and fun - not political, sad, or scary.” Do you think, in this context, with the issues currently dominating the headlines in the Middle East, that it is possible to find a balance between the political and the poetic? In other words, is crazy-funny-fun vs. political-sad-scary a false opposition?

BOOKATZ: Yes, I think it’s both possible and crucial. As I mentioned before, David channeled the great Lenny Bruce for his performance piece. The contentious headline that he referenced suggests that there was no Holocaust, but that, in fact, all the Jews were moved to Argentina instead. I realize this can be considered outrageous to some – and the president of Iran is not really gaining any more friends these days with his Holocaust denial ranting – but I’ve always been a proponent of having a sense of humor about things. The Holocaust, historically speaking, is of course no laughing matter, and my own mother gives tours at the Holocaust museum in my hometown, but how will we ever get to the point of openly discussing these issues if we don’t rock the boat a little? I mean, people have rocked the boat much more than this (think Chris Ofili and Andres Serrano). Furthermore, I really hate shows where you come out feeling sad and depleted of energy. I want people to come out of our shows – and this one in particular – feeling refueled and happy that we have such a great outlet as art.

This entry was written by Jeff Kinkle, posted on October 8, 2009 at 4:33 am, filed under Art, Interviews and tagged And Now that "The Six Million Jews Found Alive in Argentina" Are Mostly Dead By Now?, Ashemuslim Mice We Are, David Liver, Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi, Rugiada Cadoni, Y Liver. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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