Press release and gallery guide from Leila Hekmat's Crocopazzo! show at Isabella Bortolozzi Gallery, Berlin, 3rd March - 4th July 2020
Size: 30 x 21cm
pp. 4
Hekmat writes, directs, and creates costumes for highly aestheticized experimental theatre pieces performed in intimate spaces.“CROCOPAZZO!” is split across three rooms, the first filled with eight mannequins posed as if interrupted mid-dialogue. The room is draped from floor to ceiling in black velvet, onto which a sinister cast of similarly attired and similarly monstrous figures—composed through digital collages—have been printed. It is only in the third room that the plot is revealed. CROCOPAZZO! (2020), a video of a play by Hekmat that brings the mannequins to life, is projected onto one wall of a blacked-out screening room. “CROCOPAZZO!” is glorious and riotous, but this is gallows humor, and there is only one logical outcome. The final shot is of a tangle of bodies strewn across the floor. Life is a farce. The best we can do is laugh.