Consecrated Networks Solo exhibition by Basmah Felemban

Curated By

( 6 March → 14 May 2024)

Solo Exhibition

Felemban’s work uses 3D modeling, 3D Printing, and fabrication as a method of documenting this natural behavior in a sci-fi written narrative, contributing to an ongoing Worldbuilding process. The project provides a deeper understanding of the phenomenon and its possible explanations, shedding light on the complex interactions between nature and human activity.

Solo Exhibition Basmah Felemban Curated By Ruba Al-Sweel Whether gazing into the dusty haze of Jeddah’s cityscape or scanning the columns and rows of the graphic design grid system, patterns emerge. Everywhere, operations of information-organization are underway.

Numbers and geometry. Proportions, harmonizations and combinations. Symbolic messages on material culture become visible. Architecture as exchange and communication. Concrete and steel thrusting towards the sky like jagged lines on a chart, organizing large amounts of data.

Consecrated Networks is Basmah Felemban’s first solo exhibition, presenting across three gallery spaces a backlog of documentation, experimentation and supporting material that built her decade-long portfolio of multimedia, research-based works. From looking at theoretical aesthetics of theological architecture to Islamic cosmology, she dovetails into ideas of seen and unseen universes, tapping into psychoanalytic concepts, memory and nostalgia. Like the built and natural environments, patterns in this exhibition emerge and are deployed as literary devices: catfish as a vehicle for concealment in plain sight, architectural niches as the uncanny valley1, pilgrimage as data transfer, stone as the original hard drive, urban voids as limbo.

This exhibition reveals the artist’s playful interpretation of the role that archives play in the future. Felemban positions the archive as subconscious, an organic storehouse of memory-traces that are occasionally rearranged in accordance with new circumstances. She looks at the world-building capacities of dreams, and architecture as monument—both, equally polysemic forms undergirding larger symbolic systems. She abstracts architecture to view it as a ritual of construction and deconstruction: to strip the constituents of a whole to their very forms and essences, revealing the ways the parts are interrelated and arranged in symbolically loaded poetry.

Consecrated Networks is curated by Ruba Al-Sweel, an independent curator and artist focusing on media theory and digital communications. Exhibition publication and catalogue design and graphics courtesy of Mohammed Tatour of Mooni Studio.

Production assistant Yasser AlZahrani.

About Basmah Felemban

many international and local exhibitions such as Julia Stoschek Berlin, Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU, Noor Riyadh, Art Dubai, 39/21, Contemporary Istanbul, Venice Biennale, and Art Abu Dhabi, among many. In 2014, she won The Arab Women Awards in the Young Talent category, and was invited to be on the jury the following year. Driven by her experience as a young creative in Saudi Arabia, she started Saudi Street Art, an ongoing curatorial project where she connects the local HipHop and street creative practices with the art industry through exhibitions, festivals, and one on one mentorships.

The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object.

Worldbuilding The essence of Felemban’s worlds is an impossible geometric shape called Gömböc; the first known homogenous object with one stable and one unstable equilibrium point, Its existence was conjectured by the Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold in 1995 and proven in 2006 by the Hungarian scientists Gábor Domokos and Péter Várkonyi.

School as a Model (2024) Videogame on monitor This game is a walk-through into a 3D model of the artist’s high school, named the 27th. Each room features a playlist of videos posted by students commemorating the end of the school year-- the only time of the year that girls are allowed to bring a camera into school, becoming the only documentation available of schools through the students’ eye. Felemban says: “In my darkest moments, I found solace in the repetitive motion of a fan, drowning out the world's chaos. As my knowledge expanded beyond the confines of school, so did my awareness of my own learning struggles. Rules lost their grip on me, and reality mirrored my daydreams, a bittersweet revelation.

I turned to patterns, mind maps, and esoteric concepts for refuge, finding spirituality in the mundane. My focus shifted to navigating my surroundings, finding hiding spots, mastering avoidance tactics, and obsessively noting details of my environment..”

Elemental Sprite (2024) Gouache Paint, Ink Pen on Gessoed Plywood, 99 x 51 cm ` The series represents the four elements that are on the extreme ends of how we look at a sphere morphing from the perspective of an atom measuring scale on the “Zing Diagram”, a diagram used as the foundation of an alternative classification system developed by the founders of the Gömböc.

In this layout, the elements are repeated in a grid used in game-making called a “sprite” which is the optimal way to include 2D moving images into game buttons.

Catfish As a Vehicle For Concealment In Plain Sight Fantasies of the End (2024) The Jirry Tribe Stop (2020) Interactive video installation, with 3D artist: Iyas Dehathim and Game Developer Hussam Dehathim

Fish From the Ground (2023) Plexiglass, metal, Resin, hologram fan In this work, Felemban investigates the surreal event that occurred in Riyadh in 2015, exploring various theories to explain the phenomenon of fish growing from the ground in the community of Wadi Hanifah. The viral video that documented visitors hand fishing in muddy ground in a desert area with no running water sparked curiosity and raised questions about how this could be possible.

One theory posits that the fish are the result of the unnatural migration routes of birds from African and Indonesian rivers. These birds carry fish eggs on their feet that get washed away by rainwater. When the eggs hatch, catfish emerge, and they are able to hibernate during the dry season until the next rainfall.

Another theory goes back to the history of fish farming in Riyadh, which started 60 years ago along Wadi Hanifah.

Some types of river fishes can survive in the valley, creating and adapting to the environment. This theory suggests that the catfish have been present in the valley for a long time and have been able to thrive in the unique environment of Wadi Hanifah.

Basmah Felemban was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

She is a self-taught Graphic Designer who graduated with an MA in Islamic and Traditional Art from the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, UK in 2017. Her first work “Jeem” – a geometric painting on layered plywood – marked a transition from Design to Contemporary Art and made its debut at the British Museum in 2012 as a sideshow to “Journey To The Heart of Islam: Hajj Exhibition”. Felemban has exhibited in 1

Felemban seeks to build an imaginative world, looking beyond the human from the perspective of the catfish.

Rather than taking the audience deeper into their own world, they instead enter that of another species, embarking on the surreal story that brought these fish from their original home to the middle of Najd’s desert.

The surreal and thought-provoking narratives are based on the Indonesian author Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul’s collection of poems ‘The Gold Fish’ which trace a journey of self-awareness and rebirth from the limited world of a fishbowl to a freedom that was difficult to achieve.

and tools that a sailor needs when he’s in the heart of the ocean. The game of Carrom requires understanding angles, motion, distance and tactics, aspects that one needs to learn while traveling across seas, a journey that has been used as a symbol for self-discovery in much of literature.

This interactive video game is presented as an elaborate cosmography where the player can help create input data for the Jirry Tribe by trying different variables of atom cells, and test their survival chances during extreme changes or disasters. The work is the artist’s most comprehensive worldbuilding venture to date and is developed around stories she has scripted as a foundation for a new, simulated world with its own logic, language and order. Formally, the work is composed of surrealist tempered abstractions. Semiotically, the rhythmic array of shapes, colors, and imagery form a complex system of signification developed by Felemban over a two-year period and programmed in collaboration with a team of 3D artists and game designers. In a world where unity is not the underlying order in everything, but rather duality and extreme paradoxes, a mythical creature called Jirry i.e. catfish, lives to maintain the order of this reality. To acclimate and survive, they developed deep knowledge in calculating data and probabilities, game strategy and problem-solving.

They are synchronized: their home is not a place but a continuous stream of collaborative practices — playing, singing and simply being together. Living in a flat world, in the middle of the Red Sea, the Jirry follows the Zingg diagram, which was introduced in 1935 to help geologists classify the overall shape of sedimentary particles like pebble crystals. According to this classification system, four forms are defined and mixable: bladed, oblate, equant, and prolate.

Diagrams of the elements help them understand the system of which they exist in as higher creatures, and they use them to collect data that helps them navigate their migration.

The Eleventh View of Time (2023) Video projection on bamboo screen

Coral Sprite Leaf (2024) Plywood, ballpen, 277 x 115 cm

In Fantasies of the End, Felemban looks at Islamic architecture as mirroring divine imaginaries: ornate visions of the end times, detailed descriptions of purgatory, the intermediate states between life and heaven. Here, she draws from Ibn al-'Arabi's diagram of "Plain of Assembly" (Ard al-Hashr) on the Day of Judgment, from the autograph manuscript of Futuhat al-Makkiyya, ca. 1238.

Pilgrimage As Data Transfer

Part of the artist's series inspired by 'The Transcendent Philosophy of the Four Journeys of the Intellect', a compendium of Islamic philosophy written by the 17th century Islamic scholar Mulla Sadra.

Magadeer (2024) Pen on plywood, 61 x 49 cm In this work, the artist looks at the sacred act of pilgrimage as a form of data transfer. A way for, not only bodies, but culture to move across geographies. With such transfer, interruptions are inevitable. Magadeer references a song by the late Saudi musician Talal Maddah that was chanted by Indonesian pilgrims during Hajj in Mina who were under the impression that the song is a litany, a form of prayer or beseechment. While not originally intended as a religious song, its melodic structure and lyrics resonated with some Indonesians who mistakenly perceived it as suitable for religious gatherings, including Hajj.

This phenomenon highlights the fascinating and often unpredictable ways cultural elements can transcend national borders and take root in new contexts, even if based on misunderstandings. It also demonstrates the potential for cultural exchange to occur organically, outside of formal channels.

The artist recreated this scene from a viral video using AI and a stitched panoramic view. This event marks a turning point in the artist's world-building practice, connecting elements of ritual and symbolism and looking at interruption and error as tools equally meaningful in a world’s logic.

Dreamscape

Coral Cosmography Leaf (2024) Plywood, ballpen, 126 x 59.4 cm

Pulang (To Go Home) (2024) Video installation

Coral Smart UV Map (2024) Plywood, ballpen, 130 x 136

The Grid The grid underlies and informs much of Felemban’s work, both conceptually and formally. It serves as a foundation and system of organization to define structures and proportions. More than a tool for composition and aesthetic, the grid becomes a locus of a complex web of relations. A theory that creates logic and rhythm, encoded symbols of divinity. A sublime geometry inspired by God's creation and existing in nature.

The Journey in Creatures by God (2017) Wood veneer inlay, 120 x 120 cm Carrom is a traditional Indian board game with a design that includes a compass in the middle where the seeds are arranged to be hit by the striker when flicking it. The artist redesigned the board in wood veneer, first to fit within the proportion of the moon (represented by the compass in the center) to the earth (represented by the whole board); and second, by using maps of the ocean from Piri Reis’s 16th century manuscript ‘Book of Navigation’. In this, he mapped all the places he explored, as well as explaining in a poetic language the knowledge

This video looks at the difficulties the artist faced in tracing the history of her family's migration to Saudi Arabia – often a quick journey with many dead ends due to scarcity of material and access. To bypass this, she resorts to the internet. Titled Pulang, which means “to return” or “to go home”, the video captures Felemban's attempt at understanding the migration of Indonesian families, particularly from Palembang, to Saudi Arabia which primarily occurred for religious reasons.

Palembang, the capital of the Indonesian province of South Sumatra, suffers from a lack of historical record due to its fraught colonial history—Dutch control in the 17th to the 20th centuries left its mark on the city's infrastructure and trade, while the brief Japanese occupation during World War II shaped Palembang's landscape. The catfish once again makes an appearance here, referencing the export of catfish from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia which marked a significant leap in diplomatic relations given that Saudi considers catfish consumption forbidden due to its bottom-feeding habits.

However, it holds a significant place in Indonesian food culture. In the 1990s, the Indonesian government, in consultation with Saudi Arabia, designated catfish as the official dish for Indonesian pilgrims.