Art review: Kahn and Selesnick at Kopeikin

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It is said that history is written by the victors, but the chronicle of our species makes an unusually compelling read when told by artists who interweave fiction and fact, extracting dubious subplots from the familiar master narrative. Kahn and Selesnick, artistic collaborators for more than 20 years, are masters of the genre, tricksters of the most ingenious and amusing sort.

In their most recent project, at Kopeikin, they spin a tale (through photographs and an assortment of vintage and fabricated objects) about an iceberg that drifted into the Baltic Sea in the fall of 1923, ultimately settling into the German port of Lübeck.

Enterprising citizens of the town declared the iceberg a free trade zone, named it “Eisbergfreistadt” (Iceberg Free State) and issued currency that became dramatically devalued, following the fate of the mark during the inflationary Weimar era.

Bank notes bearing an image of the iceberg with spiraling Babel-like towers or an Expressionist structure of jagged shards are displayed in a case, as artifacts. They also line a coat and a dress, as they were said to do when the notes became worthless except as insulation or decoration.

As in several previous bodies of work, Kahn and Selesnick deftly adopt the stylistic idioms of the period in which their tale is set, so that even the most fantastic of imagery — a photograph of a single-passenger zeppelin sheathed in bank notes, for instance — feels anchored in the past, in a history that, if not exactly true, has at least a persuasive texture and heft.

Their (re-)creations may be tongue-in-cheek, but they complicate the boundary between document and parable. Like the more sober, photographically illustrated fictions of W.G. Sebald, Kahn and Selesnick’s work exploits the innate evidentiary credibility of the photograph, and affirms just how fluid a medium history can be.

Kopeikin Gallery, 8810 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (310) 385-5894, through Aug. 22. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.kopeikingallery.com