Figure and Ground is a series conceived by Nadine Khalil for Warehouse421 that synthesizes particular threads of artistic practice from the point of view of co-creation, polyphony, and community. Here, artist Hashel Al Lamki and Munira Al Sayegh become collaborators in a call-and-response that is emblematic of the cultural infrastructure and modus operandi of the artists, curators, writers, and producers in and around Warehouse421.
Abstracting Landscape
Hashel Al Lamki’s landscapes can be situated between stillness and movement. Through painterly gestures, different levels of scale and sound, Nadine Khalil looks at how his works expand spatially and geographically to encompass both the real and the imaginary.
In The Cup and the Saucer, Hashel Al Lamki is displaying a salon-style room of 50 paintings called Versailles, none of which actually depict the palace or its gardens – for instance, what looks like a lush European countryside is actually the horse-riding course in Al Ain.
“It’s this idea of the ultimate achievement, but it’s not really Versailles,” he says. And the salon hanging isn’t really about an art salon either. It mimics one of the walls in Munira’s house, except for the framing in raw wood, which Hashel reveals is a “stripping down of all ornament.” What he takes away in superfluity, he adds in ambient sound. Echoes of wind, glass, sand, birds and pills in a bottle permeate the room. These field recordings are textural, and digitally manipulated in different drafts. As reverberations, they create sonic architectures that convey a strong feeling of spatiality.
The works are considered in totality, as an installation. “Versailles addresses the floor, the walls, light and sound,” Hashel explains. “There are no individual titles for each piece – it’s one work.” He seems to be asking: how do you activate an immobile painting? “I want the viewer to imagine being in these spaces,” he continues.
The series of layered sounds he recorded couch subtle movements: bringing rocks from Jebel Hafeet together, stepping into an elevator, opening up morning vitamins, moving around in a living space and other daily rituals. “When you are in a space, you aren’t separate from it, so there is no memory of it. The memory arises when you leave.” This notion of remembrance that surfaces as a result of displacement is very present in his work as he recreates spaces where the familiar and the uncanny intermingle, where ‘elsewhere’ is here.
‘Here’ is many things at once: Jebel Hafeet illuminated as a mountainous topography of night lights, winding roads and mossy flora, a horse’s head referencing a statue by Tawam hospital where Hashel was born, a vibrant fruit market minus people and an ADNOC station at sunset alluding to work trips with his father. “At some point on my journey into my background of mixed heritage and identities, I felt like I needed to situate myself with a Google pin. And that was Al Ain, because it’s where everything started.”
From Hashel’s longing for place emerges a yearning for painting. “Before moving to New York to study, I was a painter and then I shifted to reliefs and assemblages. Painting has brought me back to my origins in a way. Being in a physical studio also triggered memories of painting in my parents’ kitchen as a kid…”
“I didn’t really understand what I was doing then, but it just happened. Every day after school, I’d miss out on all the video games and social activities. I was trying to create worlds. Now I find myself painting an idea. I’m also trying to create an experience, not just paintings that hang on the wall.” This return to painting as a solitary activity has developed into expanded forms that include artist-collaborators like Shaikha Al Ketbi, who formed a sound sculpture out of Hashel’s recorded actions and Isaac Sullivan, who incorporated his recordings during a hybrid live set performance in Alserkal Avenue in response to Versailles (as part of The Cup and the Saucer exhibition preview last year).
Hashel’s paintings range from an expressionist realism to a fluid abstraction, channeling the murkiness of emotion in moving landscapes of colour – he explains that his process starts when the canvas is completely filled with paint. Despite the topographical references, there’s a certain utopic placelessness to his juxtapositions. Nightscapes have elements that look like day, vivid markings of sunset rise above blankets of pitch black.
These fiery skies reappear in recent paintings too. The Egg – a performance center in Albany that Hashel encountered on one of his first drives to his NYC campus – is part of a new series of works (Port Authority) that began during lockdown this summer, envisioning American landscapes as wondrous iconographies. Hashel recreates his gaze at his surroundings during his time in America. “I was so porous when I left the UAE,” he recalls.
“This relationship between space and place is something that links Hashel’s practice to mine,” Munira says. “In the case of Linger and Departure, the work cannot be tied to the landscape of the UAE.” As the largest single painting in The Cup and the Saucer, Linger and Departure connects the utopic with the apocalyptic. A golf course morphs into a desert overtaken by animals, where a whirling spiral of water cuts across. A polar bear hovers over a bloody carcass, penguins are silhouettes in the background and jellyfish fly overhead.
The painting is place disoriented. “But it’s more metaphorical than physical,” Hashel explains. “When you are on a golf course in the middle of the desert, you have all these unknown elements you need to deal with.” As a work that responds to different architectures (the dip in its frame is structured around Bait15, where it was made), and forms of life between land and water, it’s neither here nor there. And while it’s teeming with aliveness, it’s a place without humans.
“I’m drawn to the sense of abandonment in a space,” Hashel muses. “It’s beautiful when you are left alone to embrace that, to take it all in. If you are with people, then it’s a party and I’m not sure I’m interested in that.”