Dina Hoffman, Tickling Erdoğan’s Moustache

This exhibition features two series of printed matter objects by Dina Hoffman. In the first series she has invented a magazine for young children, titled “Toys” and printed by Dina Hoffman Press. As her point of departure, Hoffman relates to children’s literature and toys as tools for expressing emotions, which pass through phrases and concepts we have all grown up on. These tools serve as raw materials for her creation, based on the assumption that toys are part of a simulation and survival strategy that connects the conceptual to the abstract and the intuitive to the rational. Hoffman deals with the “serious” side of play and absurdity via unmediated or hybridic connections as a creative route that has been characteristic of Dadaism from its inception. The collages deal with memory and bereavement during wartime as educational values. Using the language of children, the artist criticizes the banal and pedagogic patterns of creativity that distract children from the topics that really occupy them. The “educational” issues challenge the imagination with humor that is often sarcastic, deriving from “mistakes” in differentiating between source and replica with respect to cultures, rituals, and conflicting cultural languages, thus resulting in wars not between children but rather between countries.

In the artist’s consciousness and for the viewer as well, bereavement, memory and playfulness take on a painful and almost intolerable significance, particularly with respect to our children on the warfronts, who have grown up on computer simulations and superhero movies. This is what Hoffman refers to in the second series in which she used Terrazzo tiles to create book bindings (without pages), based on digital processing of photographs of portraits of the artist’s own puppets and superheroes, drawn in water colors. The names of these imaginary book titles are scattered among the portraits: “Who will save us from His hands”; “The puppet is almost as scary as reality”; “Corresponding with Marlene Dumas”; and “Tickling Erdoğan’s Moustache”, which serves as the title of the exhibition and is placed next to the portrait of the image of evil, Karagoz, taken from the series of leather and parchment puppets used in traditional Turkish shadow plays.

Izi Itzhak Civre

Exhibition Curator