ROUND— ABOUT

Roundabout is an exhibition bringing together recent work from young contemporary artists based in the GCC: Ahaad Alamoudi, Moza Almazrouei, Lulua Alyahya, and Sarah Brahim.

Roundabout is a site for communing and for experiencing the world through movement, play, laughter, and action. It is a site which transforms the seemingly mundane in an inversion of hierarchies, bringing us into a world that is out of the ordinary, perhaps seemingly upside down.

The trope of “a world upside down,” and its variations (a “world inside out” or a “second life”), has been used to describe the rich framework of Medieval carnivals and festivals. This terminology is borrowed from the likes of cultural critic Mikhail Bakhtin and historian Edward Muir who theorised that the purpose of such festivity was to act as a “release valve,” sanctioning intervals of time and space for people to let go of the pressures and stresses of daily life.1 In this “second life” where normal social orders are suspended, participants are “reborn” and free to commune in new ways. “Release” occurs through rituals involving comedy, parody, indulgence, play, and the inversion of traditional order, which together encompass elements of the carnivalesque. Carnival thus becomes a mode of thinking about and understanding the world, and the carnivalesque its vocabulary.

In the GCC, such moments of communal laughter and play are exemplified through traditions of children collecting candy and dressing up for gergee’an/ hag elaila, and in the act of gathering to watch satirical and seasonal comedies like the Saudi television series Tash ma Tashto name a few. Such festivities serve to mark the transitions between different seasons or the start of religious holidays. As such, carnivalesque rituals also serve another function: they aid us in transitioning between different modes of being.

In the midst of a global pandemic and the attempts to contain it which have restricted life as we had known it, release and rebirth feels imminent and necessary. Figuring the exhibition space as a site for re-imagining the world through carnivalesque strategies and imagery, the artworks presented here enable us not only to enter a sanctioned space of inversion but also to carry on with a language of ritual and play that can be employed outside of its walls. The young women in this exhibition tackle the world around them with a ferocious wit, critical eye, and regenerative power.

Ahaad Alamoudi creates video works that humorously investigate the order of our world. She presents ‘The Three’ a three channel video viewed within a playground roundabout/carousel, incorporating social commentary with parody and play. Here, three voices express differing perspectives on the rapid social and infrastructural changes they observe: one championing, another resistant, and the third ambivalent.

In carnival, the inversion of traditional social order often takes place through masquerade and plays in which citizens take on new identities and parody the mannerisms of opposing social classes to upend the distribution of power and reveal deep truths about its order. The figures in Lulua Alyahya’s paintings are depictions of everyday life and figures with amalgamations of features borrowed from different people, both real and fictional, perhaps alluding to familiar social “types.” These figures are situated in eerie, unspecified locations and yet are adeptly specific in the facial expressions and interactions they present. This warping of otherwise mundane scenes unmasks the subjects’ true faces - ones often menacing or confrontational, revealing the world through the lens of a young woman’s experience.

Bakhtin asserts: “Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed.” 3 Moza Almazrouei presents works from the ‘Annelid Archive’ which aims to inspect the gaps of knowledge between a historical event and a document that isn’t registered through an institutional archive. Her photographs capture scenes from the archives of the Juma Almajid Center for Culture and Heritage, where hands are touching, laying out, and treating old manuscripts for preservation. Juxtaposed with these images is her delicate rambutan peel sculpture, to which she applied her own archival processes of drying to preserve it. Nonetheless, both the worn pages in the photographs and the delicate natural material allude to the inevitability of eventual wearing and decay; exposing the fragility of our established sense of order.

In Sarah Brahim’s video, ‘Bodyland/Back to Dust’, disembodied hands are expressive appendages that are sites for memory. Her choreographed performance is an embodied archive of collected gestures, transmitting culturally specific meaning. Sarah Brahim’s work explores the body and our relationship to land through choreography, textile, and sound. Using natural elements and grounding her work in the movement of the body, Brahim takes an interest in the return to nature. Bakhtin’s conception of grotesque realism conceives of degradation as grounding, a return to the earth and its regenerative power.4 If Ahaad’s voices in ‘The Three’ join in on the conversation around change, development, and time by riding the roundabout and diverging then converging in an endless mechanised loop, then Sarah proposes a path to breakaway. Snaking their bodies through her textiles in ‘The Dance of the Mountain’, dyed with natural pigments and frayed, visitors are brought back to the body and land, liberated from the endless loop of modernisation and drawn into another loop of death and rebirth.

Including painting, sculpture, sound, video, and installations, Roundabout brings forth questions about our experience of time, our re-imagining of the future, and coming to terms with the realities of our present. Drawing from local history, popular culture, and nature, the artists presented in this exhibition specify the topsy-turvy experiences of the worlds that they engage with. Living through a pandemic that already seems to have turned our lives upside down, perhaps they allow us to re-orient ourselves to some semblance of normalcy, or lend us the faculties for imagining an alternatively ordered future.