Rich Ragsdale

Surrealist objects set the stage and a menagerie of kindred animals curl and slither across it in Nina Menkes’s shadowy, monochrome fairytale. Numbed to loveless sex and pointless wars, Marina Shoif’s saturnine croupier abandons earthbound calls and levitates toward the ether for her liberation.

Using video for the first time, Nina Menkes dissolves her quest for the feminine and explores Jewish identity. In a Dostoyevsky-inspired story that follows a man into existential darkness, Didi Fire is her new nomad, casting a hungry, rakish silhouette in the streets, bedrooms, and bars of Tel Aviv.