Michael Hakimi’s work is situated at the intersection of medium, form, and meaning. As such, it cannot be easily assigned to one of the categories of painting, sculpture or installation, but instead operates on and with these categories. Sculptural, pictorial, and installative elements overlap one other, thus forming a nexus that opens up relative to the phenomenal, contextual, and discursive conditions of aesthetic reflection. The current exhibition consists of two constructs, which might be called sculptures and might be seen as interrelated in terms of installation, but not necessarily. ‘Ohne Titel (Großer Phönix I)’ references a modernist sculpture of the 1960s, Bernhard Heiliger’s ‘Großer Phönix I’, which was installed in the entrance area of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg in 1965. The other, ‘Rauch 2’, depicts a cloud of smoke in the form of a free-standing “shaped canvas,” which is mounted on a kind of tripod. It is a highly ephemeral object that does not easily align with the qualities of classical sculpture. In both cases, the photograph serves as the medium for initiating a remediation, in which genre-specific issues as well as their formal and content-based resonances are negotiated.
