Pablo Zuleta Zahr

The exuberant highlight of Pablo Zuleta Zahr’s exhibition “BUTTERFLYJACKPOT” is the video footage of sixteen women, four each on four side-by-side screens, dancing in blue sweaters and jeans. It’s the “jackpot” to which the exhibition title refers. Deploying his customarily rigorous, mathematically based style of directing, the Chilean artist devises a fascinating meditation on the subject of order and chance, and how they interact to form a modern individual’s sense of identity. Over the Internet, Zahr cast four similar-looking actresses who then, in a single day, show one another their hometowns. The stops—in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands—are always the same: a tour of the city, including the host’s favorite sight and a favorite restaurant, followed by a visit to her home, where they all dance. A former student of the conceptual photographer Thomas Ruff, Zahr, like John Cage, uses mathematics as a compositional principle: The first scene lasts ten seconds; the next is multiplied by the golden ratio, so it is 1.6 times as long; and so on. At certain moments, four cafés, four cars, or four homes can be seen simultaneously on the screens, blurring together personalities and places. In between, more and more close-ups are spliced into the footage. For example, in the longest dance scene, many intimate details of the apartments are shown: toothbrushes, pictures, curious cats. Zahr’s methods are reminiscent of the rules Sophie Calle sets for herself, which blur the border between the private and the public. By making the private places of several people public and arranging the images mathematically, Zahr deftly illustrates how essentially interchangeable the elements of our fragile modern identities truly are.