TEL AVIV.- CCA Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv opened Balagan, a solo exhibition by Sharif Waked (*1964, Nazareth; lives and works in Nazareth and Santa Barbara, California). Balagan means chaos, disarray, and confusion. The word is originally Persian balachan [بالاخان] and traveled across borders to other languages such as Russian, Yiddish, Lithuanian and Hebrew. Through sustained reflection on aesthetics and politics, Sharif Waked has consistently pierced the absurdities of reality with playful and estranged encounters between various temporalities, cultural-historical products, and political events.
Following the artists unique modus operandi, the exhibition features existing and recent pieces, linking different bodies of Wakeds work over time. In the floor installation Crop Marks (2016), Wakeds self-portrait in an orange suit, is subjected to the print-houses guillotine, cut at his neck along the crop marks of printing and design conventions: fashion and design encounter the world of beheadings. If the video MoM the Museum of Mosul (2017) takes the footage of ISISs destructive actions and reproduces it as a promotional film for a now-rebranded museum, in Bath Time (2012), a donkey takes a good shower after a long day performing as a zebra at the Gaza Zoo.
In Contribute a Better Translation No. 1 (2011), an archive of slogans of the Palestinian struggle undergo mechanized translation, and at the same time, the military surveillance of the Israeli checkpoint converges with the haute couture of the catwalk in Chic Point (2003). Beace Brocess No. 5 (2012) refracts a clip from the Camp David II 2000 peace talks into the era of silent film, whereas the Oslo Agreements of the 1990s meet the tiled mosaics of the eighth century Umayyad Caliphate [الخلافة الأموية] in the series of works Jericho First (2002-ongoing).
In another series Tughra (2008-ongoing), Waked inserts Israeli soldiers most common directives in Hebrew-inflected Arabic into the sixteenth century calligraphic monogram (tughra [طغراء]) of Suleiman the Magnificent. The iconic work To Be Continued (2009) transforms the suicide bomber into the tenth century storyteller of One Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade [شهرزاد], who kept death at bay by feeding Shahryārs narrative curiosity. Last but not least, in the video series Just A Moment (2011-ongoing), various interventions meet, interrupt, and disrupt iconic archival events.
Balagan is also the title of a work on display in the exhibition. It is part of the series Arabesque (2016-ongoing) and in it along with the series dot.txt (2016-ongoing) Waked disassembles the building blocks of images to reconstruct what appear as geometric abstract surfaces. In these series, Waked questions the division between the visual and the verbal, perception and deception, the visual traditions of the past and the digital manipulations of the present, to deliver in a rather formalistic fashion the questioning, breaking, and remaking of meaning. Following these premises, Balagan offers a birds eye view of Wakeds art, surveying his work as a comprehensive whole.
Sharif Waked: Balagan is curated by Nicola Trezzi, CCA Tel Aviv director and it is accompanied by a leaflet in three languages.