Closing event: Miriam Naeh, 'Double Forehead'

About

Last chance to see 'Double forehead', a solo installation by artist Miriam Naeh.

A closing event to mark the departure of the two ghost that inhabited Chemist over the past month. Join us for drinks and food, this Sunday, 21st of May, from 1-4.

Double Forehead is a new two-channel video, sound and sculpture installation by artist Miriam Naeh, centred around two ghostly, double foreheaded female jesters. 

Naeh's practice explores the way stories, characters, and objects alter our collective memory, as they are revisited and retold. Storytelling implies an act of translation of a given event; she emphasises this notion by mixing the imaginary and the surreal within the world of nonfiction, to create a space where the poetic and the ridiculous coexist.

In Double Forehead, Naeh draws on A Night in the Old Marketplace (I.L Perez, 1907),
a thriller-like play produced by 'GOSET', a little-known Yiddish avant-garde theatre operating in post WW1 Russia. The original play takes place in a town's market over a single night of crisis, when the dead rise from their graves, disoriented and damaged, and join the living. Two jesters orchestrate the chaotic narrative whilst questioning the other characters' existential state. 

Double Forehead starts where the play ends, reimagining the aftermath of the chaotic night. Naeh transforms the two jesters into female characters, who now remain the sole  witnesses, felons and detectives, in an abandoned neo-noir-like scene. Emphasising their otherness, the jester's makeup imitates the makeup from the original play; a double forehead made from silicone prosthetic extension. She employs the fluid and marginalised qualities of the jester to retell a story of existential crisis, this time in London 2023. The old world of the play disappears and instead emerges a new abstracted limbo where Naeh summons the spectres of memory and identity into the present. 

Taking on the language of mystery and dark comedy, she echoes the original stage design into a new deconstructed setting. The gallery now becomes the scenery for the sisterhood-like duo, who are trapped and suspended in a twilight state, between tricksters and virtualized ghosts. 

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Miriam Naeh (b.1988, Jerusalem) is a London-based artist working with video, sculpture and sound. Naeh received her MFA from Goldsmiths University of London (2018). Her work has been featured in Vogue, i-D Vice, Harper’s Bazaar, ArtMaze Magazine, and more. Solo and group shows include Discovery Section's Sculpture Park at Photo London, Somerset House (solo, 2022), Israel Festival: Inspiring Connections (2021), IDENTITÄ, Ignatz Bubis-Gemeindezentrum, Frankfurt (2020), Star Trap, Pump House Gallery, Tel-Aviv (solo, 2021), Adam’s Rock, MoBY- Museum in Bat Yam, Israel (2019), Tall Tales, Tall Tails, Castor Gallery, London (solo, 2018). Naeh has participated in residencies such as Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2021), Outset Bialik Residency, Tel Aviv (2019) and more. She has been the recipient of various awards, including the a-n Bursaries (2022), Gilbert Bayes Award (2019), Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2018), among others.

CHEMIST is a new South-London based artist-run gallery dedicated to poetic, speculative and collaborative art practices through exhibitions, workshops, sound performances and screenings. Set-up by Kineret Lourie and Ariel Caine and located in an ex-chemist's shop on Lewisham Way, we envision CHEMIST both as a gallery space and a hub. Our motivation is to create a generative space that enables artists and cultural practitioners to realise complex and experimental exhibitions while also using the gallery space as a place through which to generate a forum around common matters of practice and politics.