Interview with Merav Kamel & Halil Balabin
Merav Kamel & Halil Balabin
are a Tel-Aviv-based artist duo who have worked together since 2012. Both received their BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design Jerusalem (Kamel in 2012, Balabin on 2014). They spoke with independent curator Alice Bonnot about their processes of converging their art practices, their exploration of stupidity, and their latest installation titled " The Hot Dog Man and Distance Thief".
INTERVIEW BY ALICE BONNOT
Alice: You met at art school in Jerusalem in 2012, after each of you studied a different field — Merav you studied jewelry design and Halil contemporary dance. How has this inform your current practice?
Halil: During my BA in art, I was looking for various ways to reach inspirational moments. One of them was to create a room with a green floor down at the basement of Bezlalel’s Art Dept. building, where I was with no day light, no telephone reception, no painting or writing equipment. I was exploring how the inner motions and ideas can manifest into a physical action; the moments of withholding the use of material led me to quite a few insights. Up to this day I keep the routine of staying in strange spaces few hours a week, creating a space for movements and rules I make for myself.
Today I practice ‘Gaga’, an improvisation movement method invented by choreographer Ohad Naharin. Inspired by the Gaga lessons, Merav and I play music at the studio and invent our own private dances. We have these symmetrical dances that we love doing. Our works also express sometimes a frozen movement with unfulfilled dance potential. We have a fantasy of creating a ballet that will remind the works of Oskar Schlemmer.
Merav Kamel & Halil Balabin
Accidental, 2019
fabric, 60 x 75 x 24 cm
Merav: My attraction to goldsmith relates to our sisyphic way of work, our obsessive sensitivity to minor details; to joints and nuances in the material itself. It is that ‘zoom-in’ moment, a contracted instant where your back starts to ache because of a deep concentration. The body is all twisted for the sake of having your hand, eye and material all united. Next to this you have the ‘zoom-out’ moments – the dance, when the body is a moving unity, gushing, freeing its muscles before an action. Dance, for me, as a mandatory warm out before and during the action of drawing. Sometimes it includes shaking my hands and head as if to free my thoughts from the hand. It allows me to work in a more liberated and yet focused manner, with an impulsive attentiveness to what the paper in front of me is asking.
Alice: What is your artistic process as a duo? What is the dynamic in the studio?
Halil & Merav: Our duo work allows us to work freely and make connections we would not have thought about by ourselves. It enables us to let go of our own distinctiveness, resist old habits and perceptions developed in solitary work and go through a transformation, through the art. Additionally, the collaborative work negates male-female viewpoints and provides a more fluid gender identity. There are moments when working together where we are able to step out of our own ego, renounce our personal narratives and be attentive to the ego of the artwork itself. Then, a deluded androgynous entity rises, and with it, the option to play the role of more than one character.
When we began working together with the soft dolls, we would sew their parts so that one did the nose, the other did the leg, and so forth. Through a playful process, surprising connections came to life. At the beginning, we would work together on the same work with the same material within a concept we agreed upon in advance. With time, we realized that the collaboration which was meant to expand our conduct, held the risk of limiting and castrating our personal desires for the sake of a mutual planning. Gradually, we began developing new creative actions in our studio work, having both shared and separate elements.
Merav Kamel & Halil Balabin
The Hot Dog Man and Distance Thief, 2020
Installation view, Artport Gallery, Tel Aviv, photo by Noam Prisman
Today we work in various ways, at times passing works from one to the other, at times each one is doing his or her own thing, yet the emphasis is on a collaborative working space and later, on a shared display setting, where the works meet and connections between them form without speaking about them or planning in advance. Maybe this happens because of some flow of consciousness or a weird sense that creates the linkage between our works. The way we collaborate changes and evolves constantly.
Alice: Your practice encompasses sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, etching, video and sound. Can you please tell us more about your relationship with each medium?
Halil & Merav: The fact that we work in collaboration brings additional voices, needs, and desires to our studio. Each of us has her/his own preferences and inclinations and brings diverse materials to the studio, so that in a given project, one brings his/her own disposition while the other has to find her/his own way to connect, to “plug-in”. And each time there is another material. We stick with the materials and techniques we use. We believe in slow learning of materials, one that comes out of the substance itself, yet in ongoing projects we sometimes have a bulimic tendency to use as many techniques as possible and to experiment with new materials we haven’t used before. We are fascinated by traditional techniques and ancient art.
Alice: Your work sits at the intersection of documentary and fiction. How do you navigate between the two?
Halil & Merav: In the past we would separate between our serious narrative documentary projects and the more humorous nonsense liberating ones. In our biographical documentary installations, we explored a new documented representation while trying to remove its cinematic identity and tell the story through a traditional artistic expression with no video camera. These projects began in a thorough research and recorded interviews. The representational aspect of the stories combines the authentic one and the fictional one, demonstrating our interest in telling the story ‘as is’ yet adding an imaginary sense that we experienced ourselves while listening and processing the story. These installations invited the viewer to penetrate into someone else’s story as if it was an unfamiliar object. We strove to expand the viewer’s awkwardness in penetrating the narrative intimacy and enhance its impact. Each installation is a punctuated and penetrated body.
In the last couple of years, we wonder into dreamy and more associative regions creating a ‘broken story’ (both easy and difficult) made of unrelated sources, which we are not sure who they are and what they wish to tell us.
We look for ‘entry’ channels into the unknown, into absurdity, nonsense and fantasy; places we create without research or reference. We are interested in how the world functions, finding surprising curvy routes from our brains to the hand, from knowledge to the artistic project and let it all digest and sink in, in indirect ways. We try to work from the most stupid place we can. We are trying to explore stupidity and excel in it.
Alice: What are the themes, stories or figures that inspire you the most?
Halil & Merav: Our most fruitful periods were during residencies when one can dive into commitment-free existence. At ‘Saari Residency’ in Finland we found ourselves in a green blooming paradise with humming birds, Bambis and nightly walks with sunny skies. Spending time next to nature is our biggest source of inspiration. We also love archaeological museums, to wander around with our sketch books, draw ancient ritual sculptures, imagine their usage and are fascinated by the ancient craftsmanship, the attention that was given to details and their evident hand touch.
One of the most beautiful museums we ever visited was at Heraklion, Crete, where they have an amazing Minoan art collection.
Alice: Your latest exhibition The Hot Dog Man and Distance Thief (2020) at Artport Gallery in Tel-Aviv displays carved wood sculptures and large works on paper. How did the two come together?
Merav Kamel & Halil Balabin
The Hot Dog Man and Distance Thief, 2020
Installation view, Artport Gallery, Tel Aviv photo by Noam Prisman
Halil & Merav: We were interested in exploring how two parallel narratives of a material can operate together side by side without packaging them into one unifying narrative. We wanted to see their flow into/apart from one another.
These are two different receptive channels competing over the viewer’s attention, creating a peculiar and not always coherent experience. Yet made in corelation with our hectic consciousnesses and the way we would imagine an inclusive art experience.
The painting includes 57 papers adding up to a continuous work, comprising unintentional connections, like connecting pieces in a puzzle without knowing the final imagery.
The painting grew gradually, patch by patch, into an infinite net, a map. It holds a broken narrative, with numerous points of view that challenge the law of “scientific” perspective (that way that a lens "sees"). It is an attempt to have a realistic description, in the sense that it describes our overall experience of the world (the way that eyes connected to a body sees). In a way it is like a scroll, a diorama, a Byzantine, Egyptian, Japanese, or Persian painting before the invention of the linear perspective.
Our technique of engraving with watercolors includes soaking the paper with paint and then engraving over it while it is wet, this way the colors are absorbed into the scratches, and the paper becomes scarred. This technique requires high concentration and quick action before the paper dries. The time limit encourages intuitive work surpassing thought.
The sculptures in the show are a result of a slow learning process of what can and cannot be done with wood. The limitation of the material is a crucial starting point that offers options we would have never considered. The failures and faults in the process are those who bring the best results.
The wood has many limitations; it is a firm and stubborn material that forces you to work as per its fibers and it also breaks easily.
The group of sculptures have gathered by themselves into a scene on top of a ‘stage’. At one end is the ‘Hotdog Man’, a storyteller, a teacher, a Guru, discharging an endless chain of hotdogs into a whole in the stage, eating or shitting them, like stories he gets out of his mouth. He sits in a meditative posture, maybe giving a lesson. In front of him is an array of figures watching the Hotdog Man as if he arrived from the past though a bad dream.
As opposed to the painting that disintegrates a central perspective, the Hotdog Man is the focal point of the sculptural installation. All the other figures turn to him, watch him and the painting behind him. Some figures reappear both in the painting and in the sculptures and the composition of their glances create a tangled network between the two.
Alice: The Hot Dog Man and Distance Thief is a great title, what exactly does it refer to?
Halil & Merav: The title ‘The Thief of Distances’ was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s text about the look of the ‘other’ and how he robs someone’s distance by his look.
“The Other, seen in the distance, is an object for me, yet different because the things of my world are also objects for that Other. The Other "sees what I see;" my world is present to the other's eyes without distance... Seen as seeing, the Other presents an animal center (complete, like an object, yet hidden in its autonomy) that decenters my own relation to the world. My world "flees" toward the Other, precisely because the Other sees and appropriates it; its immediacy to myself is replaced by an immediacy to the Other”
At the centre of the painting, you have the Thief of Distances, a detective-investigator figure. He comes out of a mouth of an eye puncture like a twisting serpent turning into a demon, a jinni.
The Thief of Distances is focused on solving a secret script and over his body are clues, commentaries and drawings which explain the meaning of what is going on behind him (a blown-up baby sitting in a wooden cupboard holding a green snake, his little brother terrified, looking at the figure next to them whose eye was pulled out). In fact, the face of the Thief of Distances grew out of the sketch of the two paintings next to it.
The Hotdog Man’ sits at one end with etchings printed over his shirt telling his biography, like an imaginary peek into his consciousness. He is sucking the other figures into him while they are waiting for him to speak. They are watching, listening to him, maybe looking for salvation, some are dedicated while others opposing, criticizing.
Alice: Is titling something that you enjoy thinking about?
Halil & Merav: There is a playful element in our name giving. You play with the words until you hear the click of a connection. Playing with titles is mostly common in our dolls work, the dolls offer a frozen ‘mise-en-scene’. They wish to hold a narrative yet not be judges as too “story tellers”, seeking empathy without the melodrama.
There is something humorous thinking of the gap between the pretentious matching of a word to an image. This gap widens as the proximity of the written to the sewed grows; when the title it too grotesquely telling, this proximity enhances this gap in an absurd manner.
Titles like ‘Decoration board’, ‘Flute Player’, ‘Sensitive Gallbladder’, ‘Lamp Ribs’, ‘Pissed’, ‘Snooze’ etc.
The title comes in during various stages of the work. Sometimes a work begins with a name, and sometimes the work gets its ‘edge’ only after it is titled. In others cases, titles are suggested by friends or family.