One Thousand and One Days
Project Proposal
By Zigi Ben-Haim
One Thousand and One Days
One Thousand and One Days spins the story of Scheherazade into a contemporary pictorial narrative, highlighting the fragile and unstable conditions in which we live and breathe. Alluding directly, and indirectly, to the challenges we face--climate change, pollution, dust storms, various medical emergencies and hurricanes – Zigi Ben-Haim counters these perils with an array of images offering hope and healing. The project was started in 2009 and completed in 2013. It contains unique cartoon-like drawings from life and nature that emphasize the precariousness of our existence. The combination of images is inspired by Ben-Haim's childhood recollection of the folk tale, "One Thousand and One Nights." Just as Scheherazade saved herself using the enchantment of words, Ben-Haim's reinterpretation proposes that images may have just as profound an effect. Both the folk tale and images are exaggerated and disproportionate to reality, creating a provocative metaphor of survival.
One Thousand and One Days consists of three parts; 1001 drawings on medical masks, four paintings with mixed media on aluminum (48” x 96”), and 98 paintings on board (10” x 8”). * The use of the colors black, white and turquoise carry forward Ben-Haim's personal story. The images he creates are drawn from his own rich vocabulary, and yet embrace universal themes, celebrating the diversity of cultures amongst us. Each part raises questions of social, cultural, and economic progress, and calls attention to our survival in the face of disease, climate change and global warming. The drawings on 1,001 basic white dust painter's masks serve as medical symbols, like talismans protecting us from the self-induced costs of progress. The paintings on aluminum represent urban-industrial life, while the paintings on wood symbolize simplicity.
* The installation of this project may be accompanied by the music of "Scheherazade" by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Paint on a dust mask
10001 dust mask
Dust Masks Details
Magnificent Day 48" x 88" x 4", 2011 | Alkyd paint, canvs, paper, wire mesh and hooks on Aluminum Zigi Ben-Haim
High Voltage Situation 46" x 96", 2009 | Paint and Mixed Media on Aluminum Zigi Ben-Haim
Details from The Morning After, 2011
The Morning After 10" x 8" each; 98 immages (shown), 120 total, 2011-2013 | Alkyd paint, paper mounted on wood Zigi Ben-Haim
Zigi Ben-Haim
Footprints of Identity
“A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And Most of us live somewhere in the middle…”
I was five years old when my family and I fled my birthplace of Baghdad, Iraq, and immigrated to Israel via
Iran. It was in Tel-Aviv where I spent my adolescence and graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1970.
Following a solo exhibition as a young artist, the America Israel Cultural Foundation awarded me a scholarship to study abroad. I arrived in California and enrolled in California College of Art in Oakland and San Francisco State
University. After graduating and receiving my MFA, I set off for the East Coast and have been living and working in
SoHo, New York City since 1975. My multi-layered cultural background and experience inspires my art through the
years.
ZIGI BEN-HAIM :: 94 MERCER STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10012 T 212 . 431. 4689 :: F 212. 431. 1040 :: zigi@zigiland.com :: www.zigiland.com