ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

OHAD MEROMI: WHO OWNS THE WORLD?

16 February – 15 March 2008 Opening Reception: Saturday, February 16, 6-8 pm

Harris Lieberman is pleased to present Who Owns the World?, Ohad Meromi’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In his videos, photographs, and sculptural installations, Meromi invokes a utopian modernist spirit, while exploring ideas of collaboration, improvisation, and community.

In the main gallery, Meromi will install a large spatial construction consisting of four modular spaces. Each of the sculpture’s rooms signifies different aspects of interaction and communal living, while suggesting that the possibility of being able to physically step inside a model is in and of itself a simulation of a utopian experience. Fabricated entirely by the artist, the work draws upon manifold sources of influence, such as Constructivist set design, the early communities of the Israeli Kibbutzim as well as the austere aesthetics of late modern institutional architecture and public space. Each element of Meromi’s rough-hewn installation possesses a consistent aesthetic with an unfinished quality that reinforces the artist’s interest in creation as an ongoing process.

Who Owns the World? will also feature an installation of Meromi’s recent video work The Exception and the Rule I & II. Composed of two separate but related videos (Schitopolis, set in Israel, and Trois Gaules, set in France), the work depicts two interpretive rehearsals of an early Bertolt Brecht learning play. Enacted by the artist’s friends and family, the videos’ loose, improvisational formats reassert Meromi’s equation of the theatrical stage and the architectural model as spaces for communal creativity within scripted environments.

Ohad Meromi has had solo exhibitions at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York and the Tel Aviv and the Israel Museums. His work was recently included in the Biennale de Lyon, the 1st Herzliya Biennial of Contemporary Art, and is currently on view in the traveling exhibition Uncertain States of America at the Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague. Meromi has just been named a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2008 Grants to Artists Award.