The Same Problem
Video, scent, performance, text, choreography, painting in collaboration with Aleesa Cohene, since 2009.Everytime he woke up, it was the same problem. An on-going series of multidisciplinary projects, The Same Problem emerges through the co-creation of an experimental field, one that permits Nemer and Cohene to ask artistic and philosophical questions they fear have no answers, or answers they do not like. Creation is driven not by medium, but rather through an evolving methodology that responds to various problems the duo faces as artists, allowing them to follow hunches and take risks with materials and creative processes the artists feel unable to do alone. The resulting works propose loose, unstable portraits of a character suspended in a series of frustrations, disillusionments, and wrong choices.
The Same Problem currently comprises seven works in a diversity of media produced since 2009, including video, scent, text, choreography and painting. The body of works traces the emotional and conceptual struggles of an individual—in turns performed by Nemer, actors and objects found in existing film material, dancer Mairi Grieg, a potted fern, and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke—developing a unique artistic and affective vocabulary that runs parallel to Cohene and Nemer’s solo artistic vernaculars.
Individual works have been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), the Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto), and in media art contexts in Canada, Germany, France, and Japan. Survey exhibitions of the ensemble of works that make up The Same Problem have been mounted at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the Dunlop Art Gallery, both in Canada. Critical writing includes “Why can’t I be two people?”: The Collaborative Queer Self in Aleesa Cohene and Benny Nemer’s The Same Problem by August Klintberg and Jon Davies, forthcoming in the Journal of Canadian Art History.
The Same Problem currently comprises seven works in a diversity of media produced since 2009, including video, scent, text, choreography and painting. The body of works traces the emotional and conceptual struggles of an individual—in turns performed by Nemer, actors and objects found in existing film material, dancer Mairi Grieg, a potted fern, and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke—developing a unique artistic and affective vocabulary that runs parallel to Cohene and Nemer’s solo artistic vernaculars.
Individual works have been exhibited in group exhibitions at the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), the Hebbel am Ufer Theater (Berlin), the Ryerson Image Centre (Toronto), and in media art contexts in Canada, Germany, France, and Japan. Survey exhibitions of the ensemble of works that make up The Same Problem have been mounted at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the Dunlop Art Gallery, both in Canada. Critical writing includes “Why can’t I be two people?”: The Collaborative Queer Self in Aleesa Cohene and Benny Nemer’s The Same Problem by August Klintberg and Jon Davies, forthcoming in the Journal of Canadian Art History.
