ART CITIES:Dubai-Mounir Fatmi
Mounir Fatmi constructs visual spaces and linguistic games that aim to free the viewer from their preconceptions of politics and religion, and allows them to contemplate these and other subjects in new ways. His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lawrie Shabibi Archive
Mounir Fatmi presents “Inside the Fire Circle”, his first solo exhibition in Dubai. Two seemingly opposing themes connect through Fatmi’s interest in the idea of repetition, erasure, movement, and the tendency of history to repeat itself. First the artist’s interest in the circle, its form and symbolic meaning throughout history and the life of John Howard Griffin (1920-80), an American activist, journalist and author from Texas, who wrote about racial equality and was known for his fight against racial discrimination during the Civil Rights Movement. At the center of the exhibition is “Inside the Fire Circle” (2017) a new sculptural installation from which the exhibition takes its name, consisting from a bank of vintage typewriters linked up to jumper cables connected to pristine sheets of white A4 paper languishing on the floor. Other works referencing the circle include wall sculptures produced from white coaxial cable. Encased in glass boxes, the cables have been intricately manipulated into repeating circles, creating a sense of addition and subtraction – or infinity. A series of 10 photographs entitled, “As A Black Man” (2013-14), consists of a portrait of Griffin, each image printed to create a gradation from white to gray to black. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s Griffin underwent a series of UV treatments and took various medications to turn his skin black. In this project he was temporarily able to pass as a black man and journey through the Deep South of 1959 to see life and segregation. He published his experiences in his book “Black Like Me” outlining the hardship, the discrimination and rejection that he faced. In another set of black and white photographs entitled “Crossing the Line” (2014-15), the images depict the lower part of a man’s legs as he steps over a white line on a street. This brief moment of an everyday movement considers the notion of crossing over into something else: from white to black, light to dark, privilege to outcast. Also on view is a set of three photographs entitled “Calligraphy of Fire” (2015), and a film, History is not Mine, which explore Fatmi’s interest in language, knowledge and its destruction.
Info: Lawrie Shabibi Gallery, Unit 21, Alserkal Avenue, Al-Quoz, Dubai, Duration: 8/3-14-5/5/17, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-18:00, www.lawrieshabibi.com
