ART & MEDIA

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A Museum of Immortality Ashkal Alwan & e-flux - Al Khidr Lives

I first came across the mystical figure of Al Khidr in the short story Muneera written by Khaled Al Farraj (1929). I quickly found out about his cult following on Kuwait's Failaka island and in Bahrain, where shrines were built by his purported footprints. Women would sprinkle rose water at the site of his shrine with the hopes that the sweet water would bring sweet news of pregnancy. 

Although Al Khidr appears in the Quran's Surat Al Kahf as the wise servant of Moses, there was a fatwa issued against his shrines and they were repeatedly rebuilt and demolished. Across faiths and cultures, saintly figures appear to assuage our anxiety about death and longevity. Al Khidr's precursor appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the eternal Utnapashtim. He is the Green Man in Celtic lore. He is Elijah of the Torah. St. George the dragon slayer, who is resurrected four times, is widely revered and even referred to euphemistically in Lebanon when we say that one who has gone mad has "gone to Al Khidr." 

In this homage to him, with artist Gráinne Hebeler, we created an image of the Green Immortal linking together cross-cultural rumors about his appearance and powers. We placed these across the floating city of Venice in contextually relevant places with the intention of keeping the multiplicity of his legends alive. 

These images, along with a number of artifacts and texts, were displayed in a glass coffin as part of a Museum of Immortality at Ashkal Alwan, curated by Anton Vidokle (e-flux). Summer 2014.
 

Crisis of History  Tolhuistuin Museum -
Don't Let This Be a Record of Our Time

King Cyrus of Persia or ‘Cyrus the Great’ is credited with the first human rights charter, which he had inscribed on a stone cylinder and placed as a foundation stone of a main temple when he conquered Babylon. In this project, I use a 3D printer and sandstone to recreate the cylinder – which in its modern iteration is inscribed with the Wikipedia entry for The Avenues Mall in Kuwait, translated into cuneiform.

"There is a celebratory mood about the age of social media, where each person can address a seemingly unlimited audience. It is argued that advances in information and communications technology have broken the physical barriers to communication, and some speculate that a new human society, globally interconnected, is emerging. The Kuwaiti artist Liane Al Ghusain, in her research on ancient rock and clay inscriptions from the Iraq and Saudi-Jordan deserts, discovers, however, that social media isn’t just connecting us to each other: it’s keeping us in touch with our ancient past. The purpose and tone of many of these ancient inscriptions is very similar to the messages conveyed by Twitter, Facebook and public service announcements today: they contain little valuable information and are characterized by self-congratulatory exclamations and empty threats.

In response to these phenomena, the artist has translated trite yet trending topics and promotional material from Gulf social media directly onto 3D printed ‘stone’ in ancient Arabian script with the hope of reviving interest and investment in the Middle East’s ancient past. These new inscriptions go directly from the printer into a museum display case, as a commentary on how slowly the ethics and values of world civilization have evolved, despite huge leaps in technology."
- Robert Kluijver

Comissioned for the Crisis of History exhibition
curated by Robert Kluijver for Framers Framed and Tolhuistuin – March 2015, Amsterdam

POSTLUDE VOL. 1: THE POST ORIENTAL ODYSSEY The Mine, Dubai - A Palestinian Freemason in Jerusalem Shirks His Role as a Western Oriental Gentleman.

If you peel back the layers of beautiful imagery - gleaming G's (which stand for a secular, all-encompassing God, or the supreme architect of the universe in Freemason jargon), towering columns, stairways to heaven, and all seeing eyes, a complex history and problematic set of cultural appropriations are unveiled. By appropriating ancient Egyptian and Greek symbols and coupling them with an essentially capitalist approach to finance and real estate development, a kind of schizophrenic logic becomes apparent in the Freemason way.

On one hand, I presume there is a sense of pride in being accepted into such a rooted tradition, worthy of being framed in silver and displayed in an office. And on the other hand, I see a kind of irony to this - by silkscreening the same image in blue and yellow I make a nod to pop culture's appropriation of Freemason symbology, voicing my worry that orientalist hegemony is being further propagated in our world today.

The Venice Biennale Ideological Guide 2013 - Kuwait Pavilion - Of Kings and Ants

Created by Jonas Staal, “The Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale is a free smartphone application that provides information on the political, economic, and ideological framework of all national pavilions of the 2013 Venice Biennale. In 2013 this cultural manifestation, modelled after the world fair and in existence since 1895, comprised of about ninety national exhibitions, each attributed to a specific country. Through the Ideological Guide the pavilions are considered cultural embassies, where each country showcases the artists it believes to be most representative for the current developments in its art sector.”

I was invited to interpret the Kuwait pavilion and wrote the following text:

X Apartments  Ashkal Alwan - Coco's Bed

'Coco's Bed' is a short film created for viewing on the iPad mini, commissioned for the X-apartment installation series by producer Matthias Lilienthal. X-apartment audience members follow Hassan, the protagonist of the film, to his own apartment where they find him in the flesh as well.

'Coco's Bed' was available on view for three days in July 2013 in the Bourj Hammoud district of Beirut. The neighborhood began as an informal refugee camp for Armenians fleeing the genocide in Turkey. It now additionally houses a large and diverse population of immigrants and asylum seekers from countries including Syria, Ethiopia, and the Philippines. The project was covered by Kaelen Wilson-Goldie at Artforum International.

A collaboration with Stefan Tarnowski, Noel Paul and Mazen Khaled.