Unveiled: New art from the Middle East at Saatchi gallery
One of the artist who will displays her work of art in the Unveiled: exhibition at Saatchi gallery is Diana Al-Hadid, a Syrian-American artist who lives and works in New York.
Her sculptures take ‘towers’ as the central theme, drawing together a wide variety of associations: power, wealth, technological and urban development, ideas of progress and globalism.
Al-Hadid has described her work as “impossible architecture”. All The Stops envisions a palatial structure, utilizing stylistic elements from a variety of incongruous periods from medieval churches to futuristic stadiums.
They are also – both in legends such as the Tower of Babel, and reality, such as the horrors of the World Trade Centre attacks – symbols of the problems of cultural difference and conflict. Al-Hadid’s Tower of Infinite Problems poses as a toppled skyscraper.
Made from crude materials such as plaster, Styrofoam, wax, and cardboard, her structure is a monument to human fallibility. Sprawling on the floor like an imaginary archaeological find, the sculpture places the viewer in a fictional role as futuristic observer, mourning the tragic follies of a past (our current) civilization.
If viewed from the end, the two parts of the structure converge in an optical illusion, creating a spiral vortex suggesting a cyclical repetition of history.
In Self Melt the top section of the sculpture is based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1556 painting The Tower of Babel. Presented upside down, the ziggurat becomes an inverted form, like an hourglass turning back time, suggesting a reversal of cultural diaspora.
Through its rough hewn and barbaric appearance – reminiscent of a geological formation or frozen asteroid – Self Melt points to a mythological point of origin, where diversity and its consequences are supernaturally preordained.
UNVEILED: NEW ART FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
Feb 5th 2009 – May 6th 2009
Saatchi gallery
Diana Al-Hadid | Halim Al-Karim | Ahmed Alsoudani | Kader Attia | Nadia Ayari | Ali Banisadr | Shirin Fakhim | Shadi Ghadirian | Barbad Golshiri | Ramin Haerizadeh | Rokni Haerizadeh | Khaled Hafez | Wafa Hourani | Hayv Kahraman | Jeffar Khaldi | Laleh Khorramian | Farsad Labbauf | Tala Madani | Ahmad Morshedloo | Sara Rahbar | Marwan Rechmaoui |
Source and image credit: Diana Al-Hadid at Saatchi Gallery
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