Van Gogh’s radiant sunflower is transformed, in Sharif Waked’s piece, Sunflower, into an exposed, bare light bulb (resembling a flower or perhaps the sun). It hangs down from the ceiling, alternately lighting and blacking out a gleaming metal object overflowing with peels of cracked sunflower seeds. The metal canister is buried within Van Gogh’s ”The Complete Book of Work”, placed on a precise fitting pedestal after its core has been uprooted from within it.
Waked has vandalized the ”The Complete Book of Work” in the name of art, and for art’s sake. Van Gogh had vandalized the body (by cutting his ear off) in the shadows of insanity. Escaping into the arms of art and finding refugee in the bosom of insanity took away the shame/disgrace of reality. Van Gogh took it to the extreme. Waked followed the electricity cable dangling from the ceiling down to the place where Van Gogh’s myth had been eroded into a fistful of emaciated peels, thrown shamelessly into the guts of ”The Complete Book of Work”, where they have become a monument to the blossoming days of the gleaming sunflower.
Text: Hana Koflor.
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