Sama Alshaibi: Sand Rushes In
Sand Rushes In, the solo show of Palestinian-Iraqi artist Sama Alshaibi (b.1973, Basra) will highlight Silsila (2009-present), an ongoing multimedia project by the artist that was shown as part of the Maldives Pavilion of the 2013 Venice Biennale. Alshaibi has recently created new works for the series, including video installations and large-scale photographs. Sand Rushes In will also mark the UK launch of the artist’s eponymous monograph, which is edited by the curator Isabella Ellaheh Hughes and published by Aperture Foundation, New York.
Inspired by the nomadic traditions of Bedouins and the writings of fourteenth-century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, Silsila (Arabic for ‘chain’ or ‘link’) depicts the artist’s journey through the significant desert areas and bodies of water that connect North Africa and West Asia to the Maldives, an island nation located in the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Performing at various sites in North Africa and West Asia, Alshaibi has composed a body of work that describes the desert as a place of enduring paradox. As Alshaibi demonstrates with visual poetics and laden imagery, the desert can serve as the starting point for a broader cultural reading, revealing the mystical and historical importance of such environments, through which the region, even more broadly, the world, can re-imagine an uncertain ecological future.
With a series of photographs and video works in which diverse settings are the backdrops for symbolic performances representing purification, transcendence, and renewal, Alshaibi connects North Africa and West Asia—where water sources are threatened and Bedouin life is disrupted by encroaching environmental and political crises—with the Maldives—where rising waters stand to swallow its coral atolls. In doing so, the artist considers Ibn Battuta’s exploration of culturally linked lands as a means to acquiring knowledge. The evident search for continuity amidst diverse environments that characterised his life’s work can also be identified as the underlying theme of Alshaibi’s own contemplative journey. The artist is shown in sweeping, uninhabited landscapes where her gesturing body becomes a visually anchoring force that seems to move in unison with the shifting surfaces of her surroundings. At certain intervals of the videos, Alshaibi’s spiritually minded gestures are amplified with references to the mystical symbolism of Islamic aesthetics, which is based on growing geometric patterns and continuous symmetry alluding to infinite, divine creation that surpasses the actions of humankind.
