Medallions, Movement, and Mamdani at MOMA PS1
On Election Night, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proclaimed, from a stage, “My brother, we are in City Hall now!” The remark was directed at Richard Chow, a cabdriver from Myanmar whom Mamdani had joined in 2021 on a fifteen-day hunger strike, to demand relief for the taxi-medallion debt crisis. The crisis, in brief: the N.Y.C. Taxi and Limousine Commission sells permits (“medallions”) to operate yellow cabs; the medallion—till recently a near-million-dollar investment—had its bottom drop out, owing to predatory lending and the deregulation of rideshare services. The body of Chow’s brother, Kenny, who’d accrued enormous medallion-related debt, was found in the East River in 2018. Chow would later chauffeur Mamdani to Gracie Mansion.
The other day, the artist Kenneth Tam, forty-four, was in Queens, admiring his contribution to MOMA PS1’s “Greater New York” survey of art with ties to the metropolitan area. Title: “I’m Staying Hopeful and Strong (for Bilal and Salah).” A projected video showed the sixtysomething Lebanese taxi-driver brothers Bilal and Salaheldin Elcharfa performing interpretive movements in an empty gymnasium while intoning words they wrote about the crisis (“no retirement no retirement no retirement / scared scared scared”). Also, on the floor of the gallery: wood-beaded seat covers and other car detritus.
Tam had previously worked with nonprofessional performers in his video-art projects (Craigslist-sourced fraternity brothers and cowboys). But recruiting taxi-drivers proved difficult. He tried pitching the idea from back seats, but no luck. Then a black-car driver took him to the “J.F.K. taxi hole.”
“It’s essentially a lot where all the yellow cabs go and take their breaks,” Tam said. Rideshare drivers, too, but they have a separate zone. There’s also a space for prayer. “Ostensibly, they’re there to wait for the call to go to J.F.K., but I met guys that aren’t even drivers anymore, who go to hang out.” Tam and his producer knocked on windows and handed out flyers. Finally, he approached Bilal in the bathroom line. “I did make it clear that this was not necessarily an advocacy project: ‘I’m not an activist, but I do want to tell your story, in a different way.’ ” A way that would eventually involve dancing with metal folding chairs—but one thing at a time.
Outside the museum, Bilal was parked by a fire hydrant in his yellow RAV4. Salah was still en route from Staten Island. Of first meeting Tam, Bilal said, “He asked me, ‘Are you interested in being in a movie?’ ”
“A loose documentary,” Tam clarified.
Bilal was game. “When someone has anger inside them, you want to explore it with the outsider,” he said.
“Did you appreciate then that you would have to dance?” Tam asked.
“It was really interesting, to go for it,” Bilal said. “Falling down, reaching out, maybe looking for some hope. I was sitting in a box where I just felt like, I’m not able to get out of my situation by circling around, making all the moves—this way, that way, left, right, down, up.” He punched a fist into the air.
When things for the brothers turned grim, “we were always leaning on each other,” Bilal said. “Don’t give up. Keep going.” A friend died of a heart attack when the value of his medallion tanked.
“You’re not sick of each other?” Tam asked.
“We fight. But we never really broke up. The next day, it’s as if nothing happened. That’s our attitude.”
Salah called to say that he was stuck on the Verrazzano Bridge.
Tam said that he’d learned to drive in a suburban part of Queens—“and I distinctly remember, for my road test, I didn’t even encounter a traffic light.”
Bilal laughed. “In Lebanon,” he said, “my dad told me, ‘Just drive.’ ”
Salah was still in traffic, so Bilal decided to drive to him. Eventually, he spotted his brother and honked, yelling, “Follow that cab!”
Everyone piled into one car. Salah recounted meeting Tam: “He asked, ‘What kind of song do you like?’ ” The finished video is minimally scored, but, while shooting, Tam had the Elcharfas dance to their favorite tunes. Salah’s: Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All.” Bilal’s: the Scorpions’ “When the Smoke Is Going Down.”
“I’m secretly hoping Mamdani makes an appearance at PS1,” Tam said.
“He’s going to help, but he’s not going to get us back to what was before,” Salah predicted. Both brothers voted for Mamdani, though Bilal also had a laminated photo of Trump (fist raised) dangling from his rearview mirror.
The brothers’ kids recently watched Tam’s film. Bilal: “They were making fun of me—‘You’re getting old! What are you doing?’ ”
Salah: “My daughter, she’s copying me. She starts making the same movements. I said, ‘Maybe I’m going to be a movie star!’ ”
“I explained to them, ‘That’s an art project,’ ” Bilal said. “ ‘The words plus the movement, it makes a story about our situation.’ Hopefully, maybe, we educate the public.” ♦