Berlin
The two objects in Michael Hakimi’s recent exhibition—works that oscillate somewhere between photography and sculpture—sat apart at the front and rear of the gallery. This situation alluded to a third, missing sculpture that ghosted the other two and broke apart the stillness of the space. Rauch 2 (Smoke 2) consists of an irregularly shaped steel sheet printed with a black and white silkscreen of a smoke plume unfurling in the air. This stilled moment is held aloft on a chrome-steel tripod. The shape of the metal sheet follows the smoke’s approximate path, its static frankness withholding the source of the smoke and the nature of its movement. To the rear of the gallery sat Ohne Titel (Großer Phönix I), or Untitled (Bigger Phoenix I), a large, upright sculpture consisting of a series of rolled, folded, and overlapped black and white photographs of a Modernist public sculpture in Nuremberg. Walking around the form, the viewer slowly started to build a three-dimensional picture of a sculpture whose gestalt was purposefully thwarted by a long cardboard roll skewering parts of the work into folds. This roll—presumably once used to transport the large glycee prints—thrusts diagonally through the images, at once defacing and binding them..…see the entire review in the print version of October’s Sculpture magazine.
