In the last few days we have all been bombarded with adverts, emails and other assorted messages about Black Friday discounts and offers.
Some stores and websites extended their sales to one entire week; others celebrated the event with a weekend that will take us directly to tomorrow - Cyber Monday.
Yet, while this rush for the best deal, the super discounted item and the mega bargain may be good for retailers, it is also a cause of major stress for consumers and for the people working in some of the retailers involved who are requested to work harder and faster.
The antidote to this frenzy? Avoiding to buy anything or maybe thinking about the consequences of this madness by walking around an arty installation that prompts people to ponder about consumerist practices.
The installation by the late artist Hassan Sharif at the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice (closing today) is a great example.
Entitled "Hassan Sharif Studio (Supermarket)", the installation in the central pavilion of the Giardini reproduces the display of hypermarkets.
Yet there are no ordinary products on the shelves, but very unusual and suprising ones, even though they are made with extremely ordinary materials.
Sharif made indeed new products out of old or found ones or combined together piles of cheap objects the artist sourced from local markets.
He used chopsticks to create rudimental architectural structures with pieces of cardboard and made intricate tangles with plugs and rubber pieces.
The artist tied together with metal wire colourful silicone molds, neatly repackaged pieces of glass in elegant silvery nets and turned a copper tube into a modernist sculpture.
Strips of white and pink paper were instead neatly folded and stapled together, the staples looking like ink from a distance, making the materials look like strips of old newspapers (a reference maybe to Sharif's work as cartoonist and journalist for newspapers in the United Arab Emirates).
Cheap plastic flip-flops were employed to form a huge rubber and plastic heap, a blue plastic bucket was broken, floor rags erupting from its cracks.
The list of products Sharif used is long and includes also plastic bottles and caps, cheap sunglasses, nautical ropes, clothes pegs, soft anti-stress balls and plastic brushes.
Some of these pieces evoke maybe the modus operandi of Dadaist artists and this is perfectly understandable since, though Sharif studied alternative artistic forms at the end of the '70s in the UK and was interested in British constructivism, minimal art and conceptual art, it was Marcel Duchamp who played a decisive and inspiring role in Sharif's own style.
The products on display in this installation are very simple, but they are arranged in mesmerising ways, at times they are accompanied by their own cardboard boxes as if they were precious jewels offered in exclusive packages.
Sharif proceeded to make his artworks via aggregations, finding one product in bulk and then disassembling and reassembling the various products, eliminating in this way their original function (nobody will indeed be able to write on his notebooks with ropes sprouting from their pages...) to elevate them to art.
Sharif called the process of bundling these objects together "weaving" as, by reassembling the various products by hand, the artist destroyed their industrial essence.
The products showcased at the Venice Biennale represent thirty years of creation: the oldest work is dated around 1986, but the pieces are not displayed chronologically or divided in materials, all the types of accumulations and aggregates are indeed grouped together with no special category classifying them.
Sharif's aggregates were originally created by the artist almost as a provocation, as ways to answer the market mentality that had flooded shops with consumer goods and to transform the surplus of a rapidly-industrialised country.
Recontextualised and applied to other countries, Sharif's works recreate our collective exercises in consumption and the way we often buy a lot of products we don't need and we sistematically throw them out.
The pieces could also be used as a metaphor about modern art and biennale events that quite often turn into big supermarkets in which we see a lot of products that couldn't be possibly classified as art but that come with a hefty price tag.
Apart from being intriguing ways to turn the ordinary into something extraordinarily unordinary, Sharif's works represent an ironic form of resistance to a system based on consumption and consumerism.
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