BRZ5. The collaboration between FARE (Milan) and Maraya Art Centre (Sharjah, UAE) ends, at least for this year, with a very mysterious title. The solo show of the Emirati artist and musician Jumairy, which has been organized by curatorial team Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, opens on Friday, December 16th at 7 pm just above the Palazzo del Ghiaccio at Frigoriferi Milanesi, via Piranesi 14, Milan.

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 in 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 environment is covered by some 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.

As if it was a movie, BRZ5 includes some cameos: the extraordinary participation of Carlo Antonelli, Tomaso De Luca, Anna Franceschini, Sofia Ginevra Giannì, Invernomuto, Jacopo Miliani, artists and personalities who marked the time that Jumairy spent during his residency at FARE. Their contributions to the exhibition take shape not only in the physical space of Frigoriferi Milanesi, but also online on the Nero website, which becomes a digital house for BRZ5: a special online project will be launched there at the beginning of 2017. Further online extensions of the exhibition will also be shown on the Instagram profile of The Internet Saga, a research platform between art and the Internet established in 2015 by curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.