ART CITIES:Dubai-Remnants
The exhibition “Remnants” brings together works by eight artists, who subtly, playfully or parabolically attempt to explore different strategies and mechanisms of: exclusion, geopolitical, economic, social, historical, aesthetic, through a wide but not exhaustive range of experiences and proposals. The exhibition brings works by: Nazgol Ansarinia, Fatma Bucak, Elizabet Cerviño, Jenny Feal, Yornel Martínez, Ghaith Mofeed, Reynier Leyva Novo and Wilfredo Prieto.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive
Made specifically for the exhibition, the work of Wilfredo Prieto entitled “Anti-pigeon lines, anti-personnel lines” (2018) deals with questions associated with power and with forms of control and hierarchization that concern humans and nature, the internal and the external, the assimilated and the excluded. This idea of exclusion and control is further accentuated in the autobiographical work “Citizen of my world” (2018) by Ghaith Mofeed. A new cartography originates, made by fabric and tailor-sewing in order to reconfigure the existing world map so that it covers or diminishes the nations that Syrians are not permitted to enter, while putting Syria at the center of this map. The feelings of uprootedness and tearing, associated with the experience of departure, are also explained in “Mattress” from the “Mendings series” (2010-2011) by Nazgol Ansarinia. This corpus of works is composed of common household objects that show scars of interior traumas. The line as a demarcation and excision element breaks through again to create new zones of tension where there are visibly saturated faults. Absence as a subject bursts into Reynier Leyva Novo’s photos in which the artist appropriates images of political leaders who marked the history of the 20tt and 21st Centuries: Francisco Franco, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, and Donald Trump – most of the time from the position of authoritarianism. By exploring the hidden or overlapping interstices of the past and the collective memory, the Cuban artist produces new keys and guidelines for reading the images, thus giving the possibility of constructing a new discourse, different from the national discourse, and revealing the possible inconsistencies of the so-called Official History. Fatma Bucak takes her own origins as her starting point. As a member of the Kurdish minority in Turkey, she seeks to address the global conditions in which repression, dispossession, migration and violence have significantly transformed human existence. In this way, she displays a subtle and poetic sensibility in her work, through which she approaches the issues of border, displacement and identity as in the case of her video “Scouring the Press” (2016), in which the artist appears along with two other women kneeling in a rugged landscape, in front of basins in which Turkish newspapers are washed. Yornel Martínez (belongs to a generation of young Cuban artists graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA). In his “Atlas”, a book-object composed of his own painting rags, remnants of the pictorial process, makes possible to reconcile gesture and recycling. The object of everyday life as a subject is also present in Jenny Feal’s “The weight that counts”, a wall clock, found in a second-hand market, now camouflaged in a performative figure beyond its performance capacity, reveals a physical tension between the categories of weight and time: as time goes by, the clay dries out and begins to fall off, gradually leaving the visible object behind. Elizabet Cerviño in her site specific work “Sigh” in a niche she produces wax sculptures on a human scale in the form of condemned bays, like mirrors without reflection, where a low sigh seems audible despite the silence.
Info: Curator: Sara Alonso Gómez, Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 15/9-26/10/18, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com
