Mikkel Carl & Ebecho Muslimova

As we peer at our reflection in our new understanding of American reality we don’t like what we see. Gone are the days when we could comfort ourselves in the idea that we would never do something insane like elect a casino mogul to the highest office in the land. We are better than that, we’d tell ourselves. While we allowed our nations name to be used to brand beauty pageants, that was still someone else, somewhere else. It wasn’t our America, some jerk was just using it to be awful and make a buck. But when we confront the fact that “typical” Americans are loud, crass, ignorant, fat, and ugly, why are we surprised that our president now embodies this? He is us. We are him. Most importantly: There is no “they”.

Ebecho Muslimova presents Fatebe, her crass alter ego. Placing her in ever more slapstick scenarios, Fatebe is fat and naked. And unashamed. She knows she is being watched and she knows how conflicted we all feel for staring. She makes us laugh with her absurdity, further confronting our voyeurism and our notions of decency, privacy, and self respect. But she is also free, charging into each new scene with an optimism we can also relate to, transforming impossible situations into adventure.

Coming down the stairs Mikkel Carl greets us with a (fake) security camera, its red recording light coolly blinking, supposedly menacing in its unconcerned and disinterested gaze. Like within Foucault's Panopticon, it doesn't if matter that no one is watching, because you are watching yourself – having long since integrated that gaze of the Other. Inside the gallery are fragments of grids, constructed from found IKEA clothes racks (Made in China) in shapes reminiscent of cages. A rigid, all-encompassing system can easily be broken where it is most inflexible. This is the end of the world as we know it.

Ebecho Muslimova (b.1984 Dagestan, Russia) lives and works in New York, NY. She is known for her drawings of alter ego “Fatebe” who she regularly depicts in ribald, often anxiety-ridden situations.

Mikkel Carl (b.1976 Kalundborg, Denmark) lives and works in Soroe/Copenhagen. He is interested in developing the relationship between language and perceptual experience, concept and materiality using a site-sensitive approach.