Nonpaper

Michael Hakimi’s exhibition Nonpaper fills the space of Galerie Karin Guenther with a dense group of sculptures and wall objects. Objects of steel, wood, concrete, plastic, paper and objects trouvés, which are placed in the space, lying on ist floor, redefining ist walls and joining into a loose narration, which emanating from each singular object, leads to another, collapses and recommences.

Nonpaper is itself a name for non-public documents. But it is exactly this status, which normally limits them to an invisible existence, which in Hakimi’s work defines their exposeability and dramatisation. It is as if one encounters a series of materials in which preliminary formulations, first gazes and vague tendencies are unfurling. Countering the old myth, that one has to tear the curtain in order to see what hides behind it, Hakimi seems to have constructed Nonpaper as an attempt to pull this curtain to centre stage.

Nonpaper enlarges fragments of imprints, expands its objects trouvés, tapers horizons of chipboard into the space, which covers walls and windows and uses their cut-outs to present more objects. Findings, sculptural objects and paper webs, are isolated into commodity positions, to displays in the space.

As if the sphinx, which is presented on the invitation card, would be applied to the exhibition space, the gaze of the observer here transforms arbitrariness into acknowledgements. Hakimi arranges cultural perspectives in different patterns of enlargement, reduction and translation. Nonpaper suggests to rethink the ubiquitous culture of visual representation from close-ups of its surfaces. In these imprints of the materials Hakimi finds an abstraction, which is implied in each and every object.

Kerstin Stakemeier, 2011