Beiss die Hand by Roman Selim Khereddine
19 April – 16 June 2024
Helmhaus Zurich
Limmatquai 31
8001 Zurich
Photo credits: Zoe Tempest. Courtesy: The artist, Helmhaus.
Exhibition Text:
The poster at the start of the tour shows (from top to bottom):
a police dog
a police officer
an artist
a white room
In the world of theatre, this would be called the play’s dramatis personae. The young Zurich artist Roman Selim Khereddine filmed a police dog and its handler roaming through the empty galleries of the Helmhaus. The film was shot in the same three galleries as those in which his first institutional solo exhibition is now taking place – a show in which dog and handler (and artist) perform the same routine in seemingly endless video loops. So what is going on here?
In earlier works, most of them video essays, Roman Selim Khereddine investigated the Moroccan peasants’ strategy of putting their goats in argan trees to attract tourists. He also zoomed in on the woeful condition of Gaza’s zoos, whose animals had been starving for years, driving the zookeepers, in the absence of further supplies, to have them stuffed instead. Dogs feature in many of Roman Selim Khereddine’s earlier works, as does the way they serve some dog owners as a bolted-on display of masculinity. The content of all these works was created by processing and appropriating found footage from the internet.
The works on show in this exhibition, by contrast, are all site-specific and were created specially for and with these rooms. And in them, too. The video shot in a particular room is also shown in that room. The footage, moreover, was not found, but rather developed by Roman Selim Khereddine himself together with two friends and helpers. While the artist often uses the subtitle line for text, he chose not to include text in these works – although he did have a hand in the creation of this text here.
Who’s playing?
Instead of bald footage, Roman Selim Khereddine found a dog for his shoot, or to be more exact, a Malinois or Belgian Shepherd. That was not so easy (more on this below) – until it was; for unlike other art institutions, the Helmhaus doesn’t just tolerate dogs but actually welcomes them. They are our very own Helmhounds. Naturally – naturally? – the dog did not come alone but brought its handler along too. A police dog handler from Zurich City Police clad in his blue uniform with the Zurich coat of arms on his upper arm and a pistol and baton on his belt. His face was deliberately rendered invisible and his voice distorted. Though it seems we had fewer scruples about the dog.
At the top (of the poster) is the artist himself. In his earlier works, Roman Selim Khereddine was just as interested in the dogs as he was in their owners. Specifically the hierarchy established between non-human and human animals. The control exerted over the animal – and the productive prospect of losing control that that implies. The instrumentalisation of the dog by its owner. A police dog and a police dog handler might be an especially good way of analysing this special relationship, thought the artist.
What also plays an important role both on the poster and in the film footage is the white space, and especially the Helmhaus’s white floors. This white livery is already twenty years old and dates back to an exhibition by Norma Jeane. And as it seemed to have a positive effect on how the rooms’ proportions were perceived, it was retained. Yet that decision also came in for fierce criticism as further reinforcing – along with the ubiquitous white walls – the white cube as a manifestation of a white norm. Which is why the artist Lynne Kouassi once painted the floor purple instead.
Where are we?
The floor is rarely as white and empty as it appears in the film footage (and in Roman Selim Khereddine’s exhibition). But that is how it had to be for the planned video shoot. Which because of this could take place only between exhibitions, one whole morning long (and even that was sketchy). Then a dog had to be found. Since the Helmhaus is an institution of the City of Zurich, Roman Selim Khereddine asked the curator Daniel Morgenthaler to ask the City Police if they would be willing to dispatch a dog handler and dog to the Helmhaus for the creation of a work of art. It helped that Daniel Morgenthaler had previously invited a police psychologist to speak at the Helmhaus’s Five-O’Clock Thesis event for a different exhibition. It was that psychologist who put him in touch with the police dog handlers. That dog plus handler happened to be available just when the Helmhaus was between exhibitions was a tremendous stroke of luck, given that almost every police dog in Switzerland would shortly be commandeered to guard the WEF in Davos and with it a rather different (snowy) white space.
The parallels between dog and space are striking. Both are apparently bound by a very strict efficiency imperative. The white space must not be left empty for as much as a whole day and scarcely a day goes by when the dog is not on duty. Both are civic tools of distribution – of attention, in the case of the white space, and of control and even violence in the case of the dog (which can indeed be deployed as a weapon in extreme situations). Both are also screens (quite literally so in the case of the white walls, which in this exhibition play the part of the screen) onto which viewers can project their own imaginings – about art in the case of the (very) white cube and about the role of the police and their monopoly on the use of force in the case of the dog.
But both dog and room can also bite. While the white gallery implies a kind of super-neutrality, the police dog implies the opposite, namely absolute loyalty, as is evident from its fixation on the handler. And before the dog could be unleashed, the lighting had to be dimmed to make it more amenable to canine eyes, just as there had to be anti-skid socks on hand to slip onto the front paws. There also had to be breaks during the shoot so that the dog could go outside to have a drink. Because there really is something not just inhuman but actually inanimal about the extreme white cube. Which raises the question: What changes would the dog demand to make the Helmhaus more of a dog house – that is, dog-friendly? But: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” opined the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. And perhaps that is true of dogs, too.
So what happens?
Heel! Sit! Down! The commands resonate through the empty white (video) spaces. “Bite the hand”, which is also the exhibition title, is not among them, but the artist’s own addition. Side by side, dog and police officer set off on patrol at a steady pace, come to a halt, kneel or lie down. Then set off again. The only barking is that of the commands. While the dog, obedient as ever, keeps glancing up at the police officer.
In some shots, when the dog is walking between the handler’s legs, it seems as if they were symbiotically connected, making it impossible to say who is leading whom. And then there is the artist Roman Selim Khereddine himself, whose presence in the footage reveals what we all knew in any case: that he, too, was there, orchestrating the shoot all along. Instructing the police officer who in turn instructed the dog. And giving him stage directions as to how he, the police officer, should march through the galleries. Here, the police monopoly on the use of force no longer applies, the artist having manoeuvred himself into a position in which, for once, he is the one giving orders, even if only for two hours. Maybe in this exhibition space, the police officer is on the artist’s own turf and must do what he is told?
The videos certainly show the artist at work – at work in a very unpolice-like uniform of trainers, hoodie, tracksuit bottoms and beanie. Visible on the floor are the taped markers for a camera tripod, which instantly call to mind the impression made by a horseshoe. But police horses are not so common in Switzerland. Then there is the audible squeaking of the dolly on which the camera was mounted as it trundles through the Helmhaus. Roman Selim Khereddine himself in the act of filming is frequently in the picture.
The police dog, too, is on duty, as is his uniformed master, even if the shoot was not exactly a typical day at work. The two of them are not there to guard the white cube, even if they are shown patrolling it. In the third video, much to our surprise, we notice that the handler is holding a yellow toy. So was this all just a show? Well for one thing, no one dared stroke the dog during the shoot – not even when he was just sitting there quietly, as in the video projection in the first room. In any case, assistance dogs and police dogs should probably not be stroked when they’re working.
What part are you playing?
The protagonists of this video work by Roman Selim Khereddine have long since left the rooms in which you, our visitors, are now standing. Rooms you might be guided through by one of our art educators or curators, or that you might prefer to patrol yourself, perhaps sitting down from time to time (even without a command), though perhaps taking fright at a loud command barked by the handler in the video.
The work that remains – as a visible and audible echo – consists of three videos projected onto white walls. And a poster on which the dog is panting and the artist is baring his teeth. After a job well done. The poster photo is an out-take, a video still capturing the moment the performers stopped performing, though the camera was still rolling. The moment when the police officer and dog left the Helmhaus with its white galleries.
No hands were bitten in the making of this video work. Although dogs are certainly not the only ones proverbially accused of biting the hand that feeds them. We are all capable of that.
– Daniel Morgenthaler and Roman Selim Khereddine