THE NIGHT IS NO GOOD

The Night is No Good is a group exhibition that presents the works of three Saudi artists; Batool Alshomrani, Fahad bin Naif, and Aziz Jamal. The exhibition prompted the artists to venture into a personal and self-reflective journey to explore individual notions and symbols of grief, memory, and belonging. The show features new commissions by bin Naif and Alshomrani as well as a never before seen iteration of the piece by Jamal. The works investigate, through various mediums, the disorienting feeling of returning to something unfamiliar; by examining both the distance from the incident or place and the longing for its return to a previous state. A futile attempt at making peace with a reality that does not exist but also can no longer exist.

At the core of the show is forgiveness; an honest reconciliation with shifted realities. For the artists, forgiveness in this context is recognized as a form of true liberation from detrimental hope. The works mark a burial of hope for the past to be altered and the absolution of the future from its implications. The show is cathartic and diaristic in its approach yet intentionally hopeless. The works are intended to be viewed as a meditation on the personally sacred and often negligible conditions.

In Alshomrani’s Untitled series (2010 - Present), the artist intervenes on found book pages using pigments to redact the excerpted pages. The work allows the viewers to construct their own narrative of what remains from the original page, often only a number, title, or even a ghost of it all. From the viewers' own personal associations to the content, the placement and pairing of the individual frames also allow for new meanings to emerge between the consecutive and legible phrases and numbers. The recurring pendulum clock, a personal and symbolic emblem for the artist, threads Al-Shomrani's newest work to the series' very beginning in 2010.

Fahad’s diptych, 4 Decades or Matloub Hussain (2022), is a tribute to its namesake, Matloub Hussain, a Yemeni immigrant who spent over 40 years as the gatekeeper at the colloquially known “Ship Building”. The residential building has been the subject of recent extensive documentation and urban investigation. The blurry diptych represents the binary relationship between the building and its gatekeeper, the imperceptible homogenous state that both enter once an association on a wider city level is made and the inseparable and entangled connection between Matloub and his ship.

In Aziz’s single-channel video Clashing Omens (2020), which is projected so that the birds are almost lifesize, there is an ominous feeling that is exacerbated by the sound of the crows. The artist employs the crows as a symbol of void, as crows usually congregate in areas after they are abandoned. The lack of context in the video is deliberate by the artist as the placelessness allows the viewers to project their own interpretations.