Ohad Meromi, Who Owns the World?, 2008, Installation View Harris Lieberman Gallery New York Naomi Lev and Ohad Meromi Thursday, December 5, 2013 6:308pm ICI Curatorial Hub 401 Broadway, Suite 1620 New York, NY 10013 FREE New York-based artist Ohad Meromi will present his recent video Worker! Smoker! Actor! (2012), for its debut screening in NYC, followed by a conversation with curator and artist Naomi Lev on the ideas behind his sculptural, video, installation, and performative oeuvre. Applying literary works by Bertolt Brecht, and incorporating socialist doctrines as utopian manifestos, Meromi creates theatrical sites that build a relationship between architecture and the body. Born in Israel Meromi brings forth his own experience of community living by addressing the agenda of the Israeli Kibbutz through drama, literature, poetry, modernism, and sci-fi movies, creating a layered ambiance and sites of reflection. In the video Worker! Smoker! Actor!, Meromi combines architectural vignettes and stop-motion sequences with live footage taken from his Rehearsal Sculpture participatory workshops. This video follows a cigarette factory worker from her post at the assembly line, to her local supermarket, to her home, and later, when she gets ill, to a vacation resort where she joins yet another kind of a productive assembly line. The placards in the video use excerpts from Vsevolod Meyerholds Biomechanics, an actor training method, which imagines a utopia where the boundary between work and performance and work and play is eliminated. This is the third in a series of conversations at ICI initiated by Lev, focusing on art and artists from Israel. This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP to rsvp@curatorsintl.org with OHAD MEROMI in the subject field.
