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Exhibition
Miriam Naeh & Kineret Lourie
Agents


4 - 27 July
Re-opens: 21 -31 August
p.v. 3 July, 6:30 pm


‘Agents’ is a multi-channel video and sculptural installation by Miriam Naeh and Kineret Lourie, reimagining a forgotten Yiddish play through the lens of absurd theatre, existential role-play and social media. The original play follows four life insurance agents on a third-class train who, after attempting to sell policies to one another, gradually realise they all share the same profession. Staged only once by GOSET, an avant-garde Yiddish theatre, with set design by Marc Chagall, the play blends a surreal combination of folk tale, schemes, optimism vs. despair, and the pursuit of fortune.

Naeh and Lourie build on the absurd collapse of these futile selling attempts, pushing the four agents beyond their original functions and ambitions. Their reimagined agents, stripped of their original, now dysfunctional, roles as salesmen, are now transcending into mediums, lovers, philosophers, ghosts.

Through four-channel video with surround sound, sculpture and print, ‘Agents’ blends the language of early modernist salesmanship with its contemporary evolution into content creation and the performativity of social media. N and L collaborated with a practising life insurance agent they discovered through TikTok. In the work, he appears as himself, narrating the play in his own style as a social media content creator. The four main protagonists are actors who appear faceless - only their bodies are present in the videos, a method borrowed from advertisement, which tempts the consumer/viewer to project their own identity into the figures. Additional characters include two stagehands without a set and an influencer with no followers, all entangled in a dysfunctional interplay.

'Agents’ explore the slippages and failures of (professional) role-play as existential conditions, and examine how performance, language and staging shape the ways we consume and produce meaning, often confusing transactions with emotional connections.

The installation, like the original play, unfolds within an abstracted train setting, drawing on fragments of Chagall’s original set design. Echoing his interplay between two- and three-dimensional form, the train’s devices, such as the emergency buttons, CCTV cameras, tray tables and doors, are abstracted into enigmatic sculptural and printed wallpaper, taking on parallel meanings within the narrative.

As the train loses its function as a means of transport, it becomes a non-place: an anonymous site for collective fantasies. The agents, too, are displaced from their usual roles and environments. Both the train and its passengers are suspended in a kind of existential limbo, gaining the freedom to take on new, unstable meanings and identities; a fantasy of cathartic intimacy.


Miriam Naeh is a multidisciplinary London-based artist working with sculpture, video, photography, and installation. Through these, she explores the way stories, characters, and objects alter our collective memory as they are retold and revisited. Storytelling implies an act of translation of a given event; she emphasizes this notion by mixing the imaginary and the surreal within the world of nonfiction, seeking to create a space where the poetic and the comical coexist.Naeh earned her MFA at Goldsmiths University, London ,2018. She has received various awards, including the a-n Bursaries: Time Space Money (2022), the Freelands Foundation Fund grant (2020), the Gilbert Bayes Award (2019) and the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2018). Solo and group shows include Double ForeHead, Chemist Gallery, London (solo, 2023), Channelling - Frieze Art Fair, Stilled Images, Tube Gallery, Palma (2023), Tired Beings, Discovery Section's Sculpture Park at Photo London, Somerset House (solo, 2022), Star Trap, Pump House Gallery, Tel-Aviv (solo, 2021), Adam’s Rock, MoBY- Museum in Bat Yam (2019), Tall Tales, Tall Tails, Castor Gallery, London (solo, 2018). She has participated in residencies such as Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2021), Outset Bialik Residency, Tel Aviv (2019) and more.

Kineret Lourie is a London based curator, cultural producer and artist. Operating through highly collaborative and performative exhibition making practice she is interested in the immanent, sometimes ridiculous clash between romanticism and the absurd. Her work composites constructed musical soundtracks, performance and fabricated narrative sequences in order to tease out human gestures to the point in which they manifest their own thresholds, questioning notions of ambition, aspiration, desire and breakdown.

In January 2023, alongside Ariel Caine, she founded CHEMIST Gallery in southeast London. Previously she co-founded and ran SUPERFLUOUS, an artist-run residency space and co-curated Dirt collective, an online broadcasting platform that facilitated live work. Past projects include: ‘I wanna live in a world that I’m used to’, The Horse Hospital, ‘It's not the digging its the dirt’, performative broadcast event by Dirt collective, Artlicks weekend London, ’Enjoy Your Voice’, video installation, Ashley gallery, Berlin, ‘The renovation’, solo show in collaboration with Ariel Caine, the New & the Bad gallery, Haifa, ’once I knew a redheaded girl’ durational music performance for ‘Knot knot’, curated shows with Flat Deux, (London) and ‘OHM’ at La-Lebo gallery, Geneva. She completed her MA in fine art at the RCA, 2015. Since 2018 she has been an art practice tutor at Goldsmiths fine art department.


Credits

Cast (Actors):
 Ronny Maddof
Otto
Boesh Tipesh
Harrison Smith
Ariel Narunsky
Ariel Caine
Adrianna Liedtke

Narrator (as himself):
 Israel Unzueta

Voice-over:
 Louise Woodhead
Louis Critchley
Dino Desica
Marcus (English male voice)

Sound Design and Music:
 Ariel Caine
Exhibition Hours
Fri-Sat 12:00-18:00
Sun 12:00-16:00