The aquariums rev and babble, motors circulating water despite their empty state. Their black steel frames vibrate. Their glass panes are coated with a salty residue from the receding waterline but also, perhaps, from what once lived within.
Two round, vertical containers are set beside the aquariums. Filled with a murky liquid, they are tall and wide enough to hold a person. Again, they are empty, save for something on the floor that looks like moss or seaweed. The strands and tufts aren’t green though.
“Inside the jars are shavings of my skin,” Nour Elbery says of her installation. “There’s a formalin inside, a preservation solution.”
Elbery is one of the six fine arts graduates from NYUAD presenting works at the Rizq Art Initiative. The show, Mutable Devotions, runs until August 31. It comprises six smaller exhibitions, each of which is dedicated to an artist.
Elbery’s use of skin shavings is not meant as a shock element – not completely anyway. It draws a point of trying to contain what should not be contained. “Each work is less a vessel for something than a vessel for the memory of holding something,” she writes in her artist statement.
Set Dressing for an Afterimage was inspired by the Aquarium Grotto Garden in Zamalek, Cairo. The man-made cave was initially built in 1871 as a bit of a vanity project for Khedive Ismail. The Ottoman viceroy, infamous for his extravagance, intended for the grotto to be a private space to house his collection of aquatic plants. The cave system, meanwhile, was created to simulate the sounds of the sea.
“It was built by a ruler who dreamed of possessing the Nile, of controlling this Egyptian land that was owned by Ottoman suzerainty from below and European credit markets above,” Elbery says. “It was a loaded time, just before the British occupation.”
Following the British occupation in 1882, the grotto was retrofitted with glass displays, housing fish and creatures from the surrounding environment. In that way, the site became a more menacing enclosure for life on the Nile.
The grotto is now empty of live fish. The tanks are barren or, at most, showing skeletons. The area is, however, a public favourite, particularly for young couples, who draw hearts and initials on the aquariums’ glass panes. “It’s beautiful,” Elbery says.
Shaima Shamsi’s Notes on Being Swallowed by a Cavity also echoes historical attempts at containing and plundering the natural world. One of the works within her presentation features 170 ceramic tiles arranged in a grid on the wall. Each tile is uniquely coloured and creased, coming together in a mesmerising assembly of earthen hues and textures.
“For me, it was an aspect of thinking about the memory of the land,” she says. “This body of work begins from a place of geology but then detaches off of it. Most of my practice looks at displacement and belonging, but through this work, it was looking at it through the lens of the land and ways of looking at land.”
The grid is an often used system to partition and survey land, “to make it breakable and understandable section by section,” Shamsi says.
As in her installation, the grid is superimposed upon a terrain that has its logic, its own lilts and patterns. In that sense it becomes a very unnatural imposition, “cut into the memory of the land.”
The artist combed through the geological surveys the British conducted around the Gulf in the early 20th century. Their aim was to identify land that was ripe with resources. Shamsi references one book in particular: a 1908 publication by British geologist Guy Ellcock Pilgrim.
“This volume in particular looks at surveys carried out in the Arabian Peninsula,” she says. “When Pilgrim writes about Bahrain, he has this constant analysis of the land and what’s there. He has a very short paragraph about the burial mounds behind him – just four lines. And he says they are potentially Phoenician or Egyptian. It is very superficial.”
The mounds date back to between 2200 and 1750BCE. They were built by the ancient Dilmud civilisation. Today they are listed as Unesco World Heritage sites.
Their absence from those early-20th century archives, Shamsi says, may have helped protect them.
“Absence is constantly a double-edged sword,” she says. “It can mean the emptiness of things, but it is also the wealth of knowledge at the same time.” Shamsi coaxes this point further through photographs of the mounds as well as a large, fishnet-type installation fashioned by uneven tiles that is suspended from the ceiling – essentially an upended form of the burial mounds.
“The shape and form of this then thinks about how the mounds are cavities within the earth, and how they’ve existed for 4,000 years – an intelligence of civilisations prior to us.”
Inherited knowledge systems echo in the following installation. In Was the Maternal Cord to my Land Cut Before I was Born?, Maha Alasker presents a room that makes use of banana peels, hair and ceramics. There are rust-printed patterns on the floors and walls – an asemic language applied, it seems, with a ritualistic alliteration. The end result is a altar-like space dedicated to womanhood and alluding to female forms.
The work that follows sits almost at the opposite end of the spectrum, delving into the digital world to question the nature of humanity. Yuehan Dai’s work is almost like an obstacle course to determine the humanity of the visitor. It is the inverse of a Turing test, with a machine deciding what constitutes a human. The artist draws from her background in computer science to create ‘verification systems’, with Captcha challenges and AI agents that observe human behaviour. The centrepiece is a classroom, complete with desks, a blackboard, and a computer screen that prompts visitors to choose a word that proves they are not AI.
Almaha Jaralla, meanwhile, scrambles the past and present in a fictional realm. Named Agraba, the multidisciplinary installation features painting scaled true to billboard-size that collage Orientalist compositions with contemporary advertisements – painted in a way that makes it difficult to parse one from the other. A table of spinning coins stretches in the centre of the space. The coins are the currency of the fictional Agraba. A larger transparent version gyrates beside it. “It gives the illusion of choice, yet both sides are identical and transparent, revealed as a structure that produces nothing,” Jaralla writes in her statement. Between the smaller coins and the larger counterpart, there is a never-ending cycle.
“Each explains the other’s motion. To stand between them is to stand inside that loop. Stainless steel runs through both sculptures. It is the surface of the contemporary Gulf, found in malls, towers and airport interiors. A material that appears permanent and neutral while remaining entirely manufactured,” Jaralla writes.
Finally, Tooba Shahbaz Shaikh also leaps into fiction to explore the effects of a city on the human body and psyche. Holding Or comprises charcoal drawings, animation and text, creating a being that, much like us, adapts and mutates based on its environment. Shaikh was specifically thinking about migrants who move to a new place in search of economic stability.
“I was thinking about what happens to certain bodies when they move from one place to another,” she says says. “You have to adapt quickly.”
Her drawings feature plant-like forms that gradually grow with synthetic materials, stems and branches that incorporate steel and plastics as well as forms reminiscent of cranes and street cones. A
multi-channel video work, projected on the walls, floor and corners of a dark space, alongside a crunching soundscape, tells the story in movement, using the same aesthetic of the charcoal drawings.
“The story starts with a seed who is stuck on the foot of a worker who is travelling from another country to here, and he’s on a construction site,” Shaikh says. “The seed also arrives and the environment is different from what it is used to, and so it starts transforming.”
Mutable Devotions is running at Rizq Art Initiative until August 31
