- Venue
- Chemist Gallery
- Starts
- Thursday, July 3, 2025
- Ends
- Sunday, August 31, 2025
- Address
- 57 Loampit Hill, SE13 7SZ
- Location
- London
- Organiser
- Chemist Gallery
‘Agents’ is a multi-channel video, sound and sculptural installation, reimagining a forgotten play by the same name through the lens of absurd theatre, existential role-play and social media. The original play, a one-act piece of avant-garde Yiddish theatre, follows four life insurance agents on a third-class train who, after attempting to sell policies to one another, gradually realise they all share the same profession. Naeh and Lourie build on the absurd collapse of these futile selling attempts, pushing the four agents beyond their original functions and ambitions. Their reimagined agents, stripped of their original, now dysfunctional, roles as salesmen, are transcending into mediums, lovers, philosophers, ghosts.
The show blends languages of early modernist salesmanship with its contemporary evolution into content creation and the performativity of social media. It toys with the slippages and failures of (professional) role-play as existential conditions, and questions how performance, language and staging shape the ways we consume and produce meaning, often confusing transactions with emotional connections.
Starting at chemist with Miriam’s 2023 exhibition ‘Double Forehead’, curated by Kineret, Agents is the outcome of a shared, ongoing research into early 20th-century diasporic avant-garde theatre- in which Naeh and Lourie deconstruct and reimagine forgotten plays, exploring the transformation and shifts in modes of storytelling as they move from the theatre stage into the gallery space, and from the 20th century into the present day.
Miriam Naeh is a multidisciplinary London-based artist working with sculpture, video, photography, and installation. Through these, she explores the way stories, characters, and objects alter our collective memory as they are retold and revisited. Storytelling implies an act of translation of a given event; she emphasises this notion by mixing the imaginary and the surreal within the world of nonfiction, seeking to create a space where the poetic and the comical coexist. Naeh earned her MFA at Goldsmiths University, London ,2018. She has received various awards, including the a-n Bursaries: Time Space Money (2022), the Freelands Foundation Fund grant (2020), the Gilbert Bayes Award (2019) and the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2018). Solo and group shows include Double ForeHead, Chemist Gallery, London (solo, 2023), Channelling – Frieze Art Fair, Stilled Images, Tube Gallery, Palma (2023), Tired Beings, Discovery Section’s Sculpture Park at Photo London, Somerset House (solo, 2022), Star Trap, Pump House Gallery, Tel-Aviv (solo, 2021), Adam’s Rock, MoBY- Museum in Bat Yam (2019), Tall Tales, Tall Tails, Castor Gallery, London (solo, 2018). She has participated in residencies such as Rupert Residency, Vilnius (2021), Outset Bialik Residency, Tel Aviv (2019) and more.
Kineret Lourie is a London-based curator, cultural producer and artist. Operating through highly collaborative and performative exhibition-making practice, she is interested in the immanent, sometimes ridiculous clash between romanticism and the absurd. Her work composites constructed musical soundtracks, performance and fabricated narrative sequences in order to tease out human gestures to the point in which they manifest their own thresholds, questioning notions of ambition, aspiration, desire and breakdown.
In January 2023, alongside Ariel Caine, she founded CHEMIST Gallery in southeast London. Previously, she co-founded and ran SUPERFLUOUS, an artist-run residency space and co-curated Dirt collective, an online broadcasting platform that facilitated live work. Past projects include: ‘I wanna live in a world that I’m used to’, The Horse Hospital, ‘It’s not the digging its the dirt’, performative broadcast event by Dirt collective, Artlicks weekend London, ’Enjoy Your Voice’, video installation, Ashley gallery, Berlin, ‘The renovation’, solo show in collaboration with Ariel Caine, the New & the Bad gallery, Haifa, ’once I knew a redheaded girl’ durational music performance for ‘Knot knot’, curated shows with Flat Deux, (London) and ‘OHM’ at La-Lebo gallery, Geneva. She completed her MA in fine art at the RCA, 2015. Since 2018 she has been an art practice tutor at Goldsmiths fine art department.
