Date: September 21 through September 28, 2014
Venue: FlickerLab (NY)
Review by Dawoud Kringle
ARE WE ALREADY GONE? Artists on the Art of Leaving is an exhibit / art installation held at FlickerLab, curated by Negin Sharifzadeh. FlickerLab held its final showing in Soho from September 21st – 28th 2014 (before astronomical rents forced them to move to Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood).
Ahmed Issawi, Director of Alwan for the Arts, says, “In so far as art should reflect its environment or contend with the problematics of representation, Are We Already Gone, curated by Negin Sharifzadeh, a variable composition of installations, sculptures, and conceptual visual and sound pieces, is emblematic of a world of impermanence, of wondering whether one has wandered away or is still here. Not merely are the works themselves concerned with incompletion, sculptural or architectural suspension, identity not as a notion bequeathed through birth rather as a transformative ongoing process of migration and exile, but more so in where the “art” is displayed: in closets, on kitchen counters, workplace, home, if we know what home is anymore. There is a bifurcation of the notion of time and space. We are already gone for certain, but where we are going or are going qua going is the way it is going to go, is perhaps what Sharifzadeh, an Iranian in Brooklyn, New York, subconsciously trying to explore.”
