Their Love is Like All Loves, Their Death is Like All Deaths: Collection

2023

This collection was presented for the first time at Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Solo Show "Their Love is like all Loves, Their Death is Like all Deaths", in Madrid, Spain, 2023
I am just an invisible person creating fragments for the future, fragments that I hope will help me resolve my present, fragments that attempt to encapsulate time and preserve it, fragments of immortality.
In the past few years, a new history has been unveiled to me. A history of humanity, a history of a people that had inhabited the same place I thought I knew, a place I thought was mine. These archeological discoveries in my homeland of Saudi Arabia, have thrust me into a pendular state of mind, swinging between the past and the present. Who are these strangers who claim to share my history?
Their inscriptions, language and traditions are alien and distant to me, then all at once, I encounter a symbol of humanity in an artifact and a connection is established and I am back to sharing their histories as my own. I am constantly disoriented and dizzy as the pendulum swings me back and forth in time.
Although there have been hundreds of excavated ancient sculptures, engravings and architecture, my first encounter started with the tombs of AlUla. Found in the North of Saudi Arabia. They are huge facades carved into the sandstone of the region with small dark doors. They are simple openings into spaces that represent death and the end of a story. I look into the infinite darkness of these abandoned doorways. They resemble dark eyes staring back at me, forcing me to pick up and continue their narrative, digest them and make them mine.
In this exhibition I investigate the images and inscriptions that have been uncovered by archeologists, I also add my own imagined histories through local folklore, poetry and crafts. This is my attempt at encompassing ‘them’ into my present. I envisage the people who came before me as a point in a sphere, that is neither the centre nor the circumference of the sphere, rather they exist in that space that I exist in today, linked and dispersed simultaneously. Where their love is like all loves, their death is like all deaths, and an artist drawing on the stones is like all drawings made by artists of their time.
- THE RECLINE II | الإستلقاء ٢
  2023
  JUTE AND ACRYLIC PAINTING | رسم الجوت والأكريليك
  220 x 125 cm
- O'SISTER TAPESTRY | يا أخيه
  2023
  SADU WEAVING OF NATURAL WOOL, ROPE, CLAY | نسج السدو الصوف الطبيعي، الحبل، الطين
  236 X 70 CM