Bile, Israel Museum, Jerusalem 2023
Curators: Tanya Sirakovich and Amitai Mendelsohn
A hot dog man, a distance thief, and a messianic worm – these are just some of the characters created by the artist duo Merav Kamel (born 1988) and Halil Balabin (born 1987). Since their student days at the Bezalel Academy, the two have lived and worked together, their studio a site for shared inspiration and fruitful dialogue. The large-scale drawings covering the walls look muted and gentle, but a closer look reveals a chaotic, erotic, and violent world. Similarly, their multi-textured figurines are simultaneously delicate, poetic, rude, grotesque, funny, and shocking.
At one end of the platform, individual figurines – some human, some hybrids of plants, humans, and other animals – face the Hot Dog Man, a sort of shaman performing a mystifying yet ridiculous rite. In the center are four wooden “Drop People” and then another procession of characters carrying weird offerings. At the raised end of the platform, a two-headed sculptor is engaged in creative work. Perhaps this is the artists themselves?
Each of the three chapters of drawings is in fact made up of many drawings, joined into one work that surrounds the viewer with multiple gazes and subjects. The idea of the bellybutton, which gives its name to the first chapter, is continued in the second as the underlying source of a green stalk in the middle of the panel. The characters meld, unravel, and are transformed. This broken narrative continues into the third chapter, opening another window onto scenes of chaos and order, life and death, destruction and regeneration.
Kamel and Balabin’s microcosm of multi-faceted, multi-limbed beings is personal and mythical, local and universal. Together, the artists form an unreal world that becomes a monumental metaphor for the cycle of life. Alongside a playful, sensual lust for life, degeneration and the awareness of death. A carnival atmosphere that is also mystical and magical. And so creative juices are mixed with bile, injecting what is abject and repulsive with teeming, vital energy.
Curators: Tanya Sirakovich and Amitai Mendelsohn
A hot dog man, a distance thief, and a messianic worm – these are just some of the characters created by the artist duo Merav Kamel (born 1988) and Halil Balabin (born 1987). Since their student days at the Bezalel Academy, the two have lived and worked together, their studio a site for shared inspiration and fruitful dialogue. The large-scale drawings covering the walls look muted and gentle, but a closer look reveals a chaotic, erotic, and violent world. Similarly, their multi-textured figurines are simultaneously delicate, poetic, rude, grotesque, funny, and shocking.
At one end of the platform, individual figurines – some human, some hybrids of plants, humans, and other animals – face the Hot Dog Man, a sort of shaman performing a mystifying yet ridiculous rite. In the center are four wooden “Drop People” and then another procession of characters carrying weird offerings. At the raised end of the platform, a two-headed sculptor is engaged in creative work. Perhaps this is the artists themselves?
Each of the three chapters of drawings is in fact made up of many drawings, joined into one work that surrounds the viewer with multiple gazes and subjects. The idea of the bellybutton, which gives its name to the first chapter, is continued in the second as the underlying source of a green stalk in the middle of the panel. The characters meld, unravel, and are transformed. This broken narrative continues into the third chapter, opening another window onto scenes of chaos and order, life and death, destruction and regeneration.
Kamel and Balabin’s microcosm of multi-faceted, multi-limbed beings is personal and mythical, local and universal. Together, the artists form an unreal world that becomes a monumental metaphor for the cycle of life. Alongside a playful, sensual lust for life, degeneration and the awareness of death. A carnival atmosphere that is also mystical and magical. And so creative juices are mixed with bile, injecting what is abject and repulsive with teeming, vital energy.