Title: BRZ5
Period: 17/12/2016  –  31/1/2017
Venue: FARE c/o Frigoriferi Milanesi Via Piranesi n.14, Milan
Artist: Jumairy
Curator: Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

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BRZ5 is not a secret code but an abbreviation of the word Barzakh, which in Arabic designates the limbo where the souls wait for Judgment Day: the threshold between the universe of the living and  of the dead.
Jumairy has transformed the rooms of an apartment into his personal Barzakh, a labyrinthine antechamber to celebrate a vigil: the passage between childhood and adulthood, memory and amnesia, insomnia and lucid dreaming.
A domestic space is covered by a dense darkness, fragmented only by some rays of light from a few torches. Looking carefully in their direction it is possible to distinguish some black and white images, not entirely decodable: these are the last remains extracted from the smartphone the artist took with him during his first residency in Milan and broke forever on that occasion. In this way, the trails of a parallel life become public and get restored, slowly exhausting together with the batteries of torches. The psychological processes related to the elaboration of grief are transferred from the human mind to the mechanisms of an external memory.
Not without irony, a soundtrack – Sam’s Song – that activates itself at regular intervals is also dedicated to the lost memory of the smartphone. Here Jumairy’s altered voice repeats “I feel uninspired” like a litany accompanied by electronic music.
Around this rhythm, objects, perfumes and poetic texts written by the artist’s grandfather are disseminated in the exhibition space, in addition to compulsive rituals freely inspired by the Emirates’ funerary traditions and horror films cliché.