CollaCurating: Sculptural Perspectives

Sculptural Perspectives is the first exhibition of the CollaCurating project.
CollaCurating is a project initiated by Areej Kaoud where curating as an art practice is being articulated via collaboration with artists, placing her work tête-à-tête with established artworks and directly responding to them. Sculptural Perspectives uses two of Manal AlDowayan‘s artworks as starting points for a physical dialogue to occur between the works.

Started as a dialogue on how perspective becomes susceptible to transformation,CollaCurating: Sculptural Perspectives is an exhibition placing Kaoud‘s sculptural pieces as malleable structures of meaning surrounding AlDowayan’s light work verses. Both conceptual artists deal with the stretching of perspective by verifying its limits, thus giving a tangible quality to the dialogue between the works. Interpretations become physical and perceptual fields for the viewer to generate discoveries through created imaginaries and connotations. Through ready-mades, painting, poetry and light, this exhibition intervenes with the viewer’s observational capacity towards a renovated dialogue between two artists’ works.

In one gallery space, Kaoud‘s pieces This Is Not The Horizon, This Is Not A Sunset, No Entrance To Threshold, and This Is Not A Zebra Crossing are displayed as possible pathways revealed as responses to AlDowayan‘s neon work verse saying I Need Pause To Choose Which Path To Take. These lit words become encircled byKaoud‘s artworks as if revealing an element of immediate decision in the verse itself. Inspired by Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte, Kaoud‘s pieces are from her project Potential Denied where ready-mades and found objects are altered through placement and the medium of painting in order to give them potential to be something they are definitely not. A direct denial of their potential takes place in their titles, thus keeping the viewer’s perception at bay with the real object.AlDowayan‘s piece is where the power of perception is brought back to the viewer revealing that this exhibition simply attempts to enhance and interact with the viewer’s susceptibility to meaning.

The second gallery space contains one artwork by each artist, displaying an object- oriented relationship with literacy. AlDowayan‘s neon work Suspended Together alongside Kaoud’s large-scale installation This Will Not Fly is this exhibition’s way of tangling meaning with matter, confirming how objects have a certain gravity that organizes the space with perception voids that are present to be occupied by the viewer’s readings. This exhibition is an interplay between visual and physical interpretations, placing AlDowayan‘s neon-lit verses as objects shaped into meaning, while Kaoud’s installations and sculptures as meaning in object vessels.

The exhibition places viewers in a position of interpretation, asking for their perspective to be revealed, expanded and then reduced back to shape. This reduction of perspective occurs when the viewer experiences Kaoud’s found artworks, their titles states their material truth denying them being something they are not, and they therefore naturally keep the viewer’s perception present with them as objects.
The exhibition’s dialogue is highlighting collaboration as a process which can begin everyday in artists ‘studios, thus attempting to reveal a hidden element to collaboration that can formulate simply by have a rational reaction to looking at another artist’s work.