THE Y LIVER PRESS: mars 2010

SEE THE WHITEWALL MAGAZINE PAGE HERE !

So, a Jewish Texan, a Saudi Arabian, and a Palestinian start a gallery – and instead of a bad joke, we get Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi. It’s a pop up gallery that had its first show last month featuring Y Liver and run by Fa’iz Marhami (Palestinian), Karen Bookatz (Jewish), and Noel Kurdi (Saudi Arabian). Devoted to showing Israeli, Arab, Jewish, Islamic, and Persian-themed contemporary art work – and yes, all those labels need to be said – MB+K have covered their bases by simply being who they are. “As far as contentious issues in the Middle East go, put us in a room and we are the contentious issues,” said Bookatz a week after the Y Liver opening in September. Their varied background allows them to offer progressive ideas about politics, culture, and identity without audiences finding reasons to get offended.

For instance, most likely in New York you’ll find someone who’s a bit off-put by a mock newspaper with the headline: “And Now That ‘The Six Million Jews Found Alive In Argentina’ Are Mostly Dead By Now?” Which is what was passed around during Y Liver’s (Jewish Parisian) opening. But MB+K’s formula has created a safe-zone under its nomadic roof and “No one has said a word about it being offensive,” said Bookatz.

The gallery was actually created in order to show Y Liver’s work. Marhami and Kurdi both have day jobs in finance and Bookatz is a journalist. While doing some side work in art consulting, Marhami ran into Y Liver online and fell in love with his work. Marhami has a habit already of planning studio visits with artists in conjunction with his business trips abroad and planned a trip to Paris accordingly. He decided Y Liver had to be shown in New York, and while he’d somehow bargained a booth at Art Basel Miami Beach one year, he didn’t have a gallery. That’s where Kurdi and Bookatz came in. “I’m the one with the formal Masters in Art History. I was always interested in East meets West and anything crosscultural along those lines,” says Bookatz. “Noel does finance and is instrumental in finding sponsors and has Arab ties.”

Their next show is still up in the air – it could be with a Persian artist or showing Y Liver again but in Paris. Either way, it will be worth looking out for.

Interview Magazine

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Tonight feels a bit like the Fall inauguration ball in New York, across all media. West in Chelsea, Jacob Kassay, James Hyde, and Younger than Jesus alum Brendan Fowler combine media and forces in Nicole Klagsbrun's Project Room, while on the same floor of 526 W. 26th young New Deal curators Kyle Thurman and Matt Moravec co-host the opening of their second show in the past year, at Marvelli; a few blocks away, at PaceWildenstein, Maya Lin opens her spectacular geo-installations to the public; all the while, all over the city, Fashion's Night Out kicks off fashion week; if you head downtown to Soho, the Swiss Institute is putting up 5 parallel shows at once (and they're all good); and just up the street, catty-corner from Interview's offices, there is a curious little art happening happening. (LEFT: BRILLO, 2009)

We may not need to travel far to get to the opening act of the brand-new pop-up gallery Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi, but the artists certainly had to come some ways to get to us. MBK's first show features Y Liver, the Paris-based duo of David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni. "David is so excited to come to New York," one of the co-curators, Karen Bookatz, tells me. "He's never been before. Fa'iz [Marhami, another of the MBK principals] found Y Liver online. He contacted David, and they have been friends ever since. Fai'iz went to visit them in Paris and stayed on their couch. We actually started this gallery to show Y Liver's work to the world." (Which still begs the question: Which is the chicken and which is the egg?)
The third principle of MBK is Noel Kurdi—Marhami, Bookatz, and Kurdi are, respectively, Palestinian, Jewish, and Saudi Arabian. And though their mutual friendship may've been coincidence, the mission behind MBK is no accident. "We want to show exclusively Arab, Israeli, Islamic, Jewish and Persian-themed contemporary artwork," says Bookatz. "But you're not going to walk in and go, 'Oh my god the Holocaust.' We're not into that. The work is humorous; it'll be crazy, funny, and fun—not political, sad, or scary."
In that context Y Liver's work takes on some levity. Their pieces could be viewed as politically provocative—one of the performance and visual art duo's better known acts was at the 2003 Prague Biennial, when they staged their "Keep a Kippa" performance, where they distributed 5,000 kippot (Jewish skullcaps) to random fair visitors. But David, a French-born Jew who is the creative driving force behind Y Liver, does not really actively practice his faith. "When I was a little girl, my parents wanted me to go to temple, but I didn't want to go," says Bookatz. "With David, it was the opposite. He moved a lot when he was young, around Italy and France. Not easy countries to be Jewish." Because of this displacement, much of Y Liver's work revolves around Jewish identity. "David's interested in cultural identity, not religion per se," Bookatz says. "But he won't shy away from anything: he'll dress up as a Hasidic rabbi, he'll tag huge Jewish stars on walls-he's kind of crazy."

The show tonight will include handmade pamphlets, wall texts of French-English non sequiturs, drawings, and a video piece composed partially of Gchats between Marhami and Liver (a very intuitive direction—when Bookatz first told me that Marhami and Liver became friends over Gchat, I asked, "Why don't they make a piece out of Gchats?"). Later on in the night, MBK is going mobile. "We're taking the show on the road to Chelsea," says Bookatz. "There's just too much going on tonight. I mean, this gallery was conceived to be a pop-up. We're Middle-Eastern, we're by nature nomadic."

MBK is located at 560 Broadway, Ste. 604. Y Liver in NY opens tonight at 7 PM.

Dossier Journal

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A month ago Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi – a new pop-up gallery showcasing Arab, Israeli, Islamic, Jewish, and Persian-themed contemporary art – had their debut show in SoHo. The opening featured Y Liver, a conceptual duo based in Paris and made up by David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni. It included vinyl wall texts, performance, video works and a triptych, and as an opening show it was as lively and provocative and it was promising signal of intent from Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi. The gallery was started by three friends – Fa’iz Marhami, Karen Bookatz and Noël Kurdi: a Palestinian, a Jew, and a Saudi/Kurd respectively – and recently Dossier talked to Bookatz and Marhami about their origin, their mission, and Y Liver in NY.

How did your collaboration come about?

MARHAMI: Going back to the very beginning, Noël and I met in an Arabic class at university. We were reunited just over a year ago when I moved back to the US from Paris at which point she introduced me to Karen. We’ve been together incessantly ever since.

BOOKATZ: Yes, we are all very good friends and in the past year we found ourselves sitting around talking about these types of Middle Eastern/religious issues. It was very organic when we’ve decided to create Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi back in May.

But, as you will see, we are all very different: I have a very formal academic background in art history and work at an architecture firm by day; Fa’iz works at a hedge fund, but has been doing freelance art consulting for years; and Noël also works in finance, but has a very pure interest in art. All of our different talents come together very nicely in the context of a gallery.

And despite being Palestinian, Fa’iz has always been enamored with Jewish culture. In fact, it was Fa’iz who found Y Liver (our first signed artists). He discovered them online, contacted them and eventually went over to Paris to meet with them and the rest is history, as they say. As for me, I have a strong academic background in Arab/Islamic studies, despite being Jewish. In fact, I did a sub-specialty in Islamic art and architecture in graduate school at Columbia and wrote my master’s thesis on Jean Nouvel’s Arab World Institute, which has served as a critical influence throughout my creative career. Also, from my studies of the Middle East, I understand its formal cultural distinctions – like how Persians are not Arab, which I find that people constantly (and annoyingly) confuse over and over again. As for Noël, she grew up in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, but all of her friends have primarily been Jewish for some reason and she’s always felt a strong tie to the Jewish culture. So I guess all three of us – for whatever reason – always felt this pull toward “the other.” Whatever the case, I think between the three of us we cover all of our bases, so no one can really ever give us shit!

Y Liver in NY

Can you tell me about the opening show featuring Y Liver? You took the concept of the pop-up gallery one step farther by taking the show to the streets of Chelsea later in the night of the opening. How did that go?

BOOKATZ: The show was really an entrée to the work of two artists, David and Rugiada (Y Liver), whom you might never have heard of over here if we hadn’t done this show. Y Liver in NY was really the most obvious title to me and David – it was their New York debut and was intended to give people a little taste of everything. We had wall texts fabricated; we had pamphlets printed; we had David doing a live performance entitled, And Now that “The Six Million Jews Found Alive in Argentina” Are Mostly Dead By Now?, a riff on an old Lenny Bruce bit; we had two video screenings (one of which was constructed out of six months of Gchats between Fa’iz and David entitled, Ashemuslim Mice We Are); and we had a triptych of drawings. We have a lot going on in this show, but you can recognize some central themes, namely the manipulation and subversion of language.

And in true nomad fashion we did take the show on the road… and people loved it! But we realized that performance pieces are, well, special, so we decided to lessen the number to three for the whole week.

The headlines from the Middle East this week have been dominated by allegations of human rights abuses aimed at both Israel and Hamas, Iran’s nuclear program, and the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Several years ago Francis Alÿs did a project based around walking through Jerusalem with an open can of paint tracing the borders set up by the 1948 armistice under the title “Sometimes Doing Something Poetic Can Become Something Political and Sometimes Doing Something Political Can Become Poetic.” In your interview on Interview Magazine’s website you say that when you visit one of your shows, “you’re not going to walk in and go, ‘Oh my god the Holocaust.’ We’re not into that. The work is humorous; it’ll be crazy, funny, and fun – not political, sad, or scary.” Do you think, in this context, with the issues currently dominating the headlines in the Middle East, that it is possible to find a balance between the political and the poetic? In other words, is crazy-funny-fun vs. political-sad-scary a false opposition?

BOOKATZ: Yes, I think it’s both possible and crucial. As I mentioned before, David channeled the great Lenny Bruce for his performance piece. The contentious headline that he referenced suggests that there was no Holocaust, but that, in fact, all the Jews were moved to Argentina instead. I realize this can be considered outrageous to some – and the president of Iran is not really gaining any more friends these days with his Holocaust denial ranting – but I’ve always been a proponent of having a sense of humor about things. The Holocaust, historically speaking, is of course no laughing matter, and my own mother gives tours at the Holocaust museum in my hometown, but how will we ever get to the point of openly discussing these issues if we don’t rock the boat a little? I mean, people have rocked the boat much more than this (think Chris Ofili and Andres Serrano). Furthermore, I really hate shows where you come out feeling sad and depleted of energy. I want people to come out of our shows – and this one in particular – feeling refueled and happy that we have such a great outlet as art.
This entry was written by Jeff Kinkle, posted on October 8, 2009 at 4:33 am, filed under Art, Interviews and tagged And Now that "The Six Million Jews Found Alive in Argentina" Are Mostly Dead By Now?, Ashemuslim Mice We Are, David Liver, Marhami Bookatz + Kurdi, Rugiada Cadoni, Y Liver. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Y Liver on Die Welt / Morgenpost

Y Liver on BILD Zeitung

URP! Mark Gisbourne & Giuliana Altea

Again the local (or locale) is addressed in a more overtly political sense in the film of the artists Y Liver (David Liver and Rugiada Cadoni), called Le Soleil C'est Definitif (une page de l'histoire héroïque) which deals specifically with youth and authority within a cycle of two separate days (14 July, and September 6, 2005). The events take place in the Rue de Maroc, XIXe district of Paris, where young people 'sans culottes' are playing and throwing fireworks or firecrackers on the annual Bastille day. Three months later at the same location forced evacuations of so-called 'unhealthy buildings' (the third in a series of such State interventions) were undertaken on the instructions of the Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. Executed under the auspices of the infamous CRS, the images are conceptually presented and edited as if they were two diary records of the days events. The intervening period implies, though it is not stated, an apparent lack of consultation in what amounts to forced and/or arbitrary evictions from the same locality. In what the artists call a 'guerilla urbaine' the film exposes what was little more than an deliberately authoritarian show of force at the expense of a serious engagement with the local population. In short it appears an arbitrary revenge on African immigrants in Paris, and is contradictory, perhaps, for the earlier events strangely were little more than youthful and over-exuberant celebrations of a French State holiday. Hence it questions (or, at least points to) the arbitrary use of power and social confrontation, without considering what constitutes the legal rights of minorities and autonomous ethnicities, let alone their lack of political representation in the city. A mantra of Latin words 'ludo' ludis' 'ludorum' 'imitatio' 'imitationis' and 'oppositionem' flash periodically across the screen. The words intimate in turn a game, imitation, and opposition, suggesting we are as much a party to a one-sided political theatre as any ameliorating or serious-minded social intervention. A postscript and descriptive consequence of the September 6th event (dated 17 September, 2005) is taken from the newspaper Libération and added as a textual appendix. The film-video in the exhibition is placed in a Ministry office space turned dark room on the second floor, and the work imposes a condition of sudden awareness on the viewer. A tennis net has been stretched across the room, emphasising the political-social game playing that is taking place. That is to say that we find ourselves in a public building location at the heart of an institutional authority, but presented with arbitrary and unjust experiences that exist between the French State and Parisian-ethnic street life.
(Mark Gisbourne)

The phantom of a space contested between controlling structures and appropriative gestures, and the question of the position of the artist, poised between the public scene and the personal dimension, reappear in the video by Y Liver. This partnership between a French jew, David Liver, and an Italian, Rugiada Cadoni, explores the problems connected with the building up of identity and the mechanisms of exclusion of the “other”, whether racial, social or sexual. The video Le soleil c’est définitif (une page de l’histoire héroïque), made in collaboration with Xavier Frédéric Liwer, intermingles scenes of the celebrations of the 14th of July in the Paris XIXème arrondissement with images of the evacuation of a building occupied by Africans, shot in the same place during the 2005 uprising. Rendered visually indistinguishable by the elimination of the crucial moments of the clashes, both scenes convey the same feeling of inanity, of ineffective and pointless agitation. The street scenes are interspersed with those of an abstract discussion (indoors) among a group of young intellectuals (the three artists themselves) who are extraneous to the events, as at bottom are the protagonists themselves, imprisoned as they are in their respective roles by the logic of the contrast which governs the mechanisms of identity; a logic underlined by the structure of the video, in the rhythmical alternation of the images and the superimposed words, but also by the physical space of the installation, divided in two by a tennis net stretched across the room. (Giuliana Altea)