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.
Screen Time Part 1: the Hyperreal in 24 Degrees North
A deep dive into moving image at The Cup and the Saucer by Nadine Khalil. Here, a creative collaboration unfolds as the writer prompts the artist Hashel Al Lamki to respond to stills from his video 24 Degrees North, in a performative gesture that connects poetry to image, music to time and voice to invisibility.
*Arabic text by Hashel Al Lamki, Google audio translations in English
How does one frame performance for the screen? Hashel Al Lamki seems to be addressing this question in his video, 24 Degrees North (part of the exhibition’s sub-theme Screensavers at Warehouse421). Although his body never appears in the work, he gestures towards embodiment, casting a performer (Angela Tellier) and staging a musical backdrop (the 2000 Arabic song by Tunisian singer Thekra, Allah Ghaleb). Borrowing from visual tropes of karaoke, the text reads like the subtitles to a pop song yet doesn’t correspond to the musical refrain. Rather, it presents an authorial voice on the history of a landscape, and an epic drive up a mountain with a luxury property at the apex.
الهاتف المحمول وربما أيضًا جهاز الاستدعاء البيجر (كوسيلة احتياطية)
ألا يعلمون أنه يوم الجمعة؟
القانون والضرائب والبنوك - عين الخراف، لسان الماعز واليد اليسرى
والجميع يساوم
Double-take
Song: suppliant. Script: soundless. Mood: tourism in technicolour.
Juxtaposing threads of data – under the rubric of national heritage and environmental preservation – Jebel Hafeet, which where the artist is from, is mapped in terms of its ancient origins. “I was thinking about how a national site is memorialized through a heroic gesture without the acknowledgment of its history, or why it was important,” Hashel says. “It was an exercise for me to understand the facts behind Jebel Hafeet’s formation, of which I wasn’t aware – and it was also a form of questioning of authority.” The facts and figures, which include geographic coordinates, an account of animal and plant species and continental drift, are cast as sub-text.
العصفور والخرتيت
يا الفلك... انا اميل إليك
والشوك.. لو غمضت عنيك
وسدو الجمل بترجع للشمس وتنحني
يا ورد
اتوسل ..بلاش تحزن .. لا و الكل بيتمشى على أصابع ايديك
The multiple readings of cultural history and extinction as a framing device extend to the visual sphere, which also manifests in different drafts on image-making. At times, horizontal and vertical planes are reversed; images coalesce or morph into kaleidoscopic geometries. There are hard edges in skeletal constructions and softer textural effects on the green screen. Striated close-ups defy recognition while familiar buildings rise, wings unfurl, a car’s dashboard glints and artificial lights become Ferris wheels. These are outsider perspectives. As Hashel puts it, “Part of my process was to try and imagine what a tourist would experience in Abu Dhabi – the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the Corniche, the Louvre – in order to build a vocabulary.”
Motion Blur
The performative imagery creates a seductive cycle of engagement and disengagement in acts of erasure and rearrangement. Hashel manipulates the digital as if it were material, which evokes the notion that video can be interpreted as the fourth dimension of painting (according to dance theorist Mark Franko). Not dissimilar to his assemblage techniques in 3D, in 2D he layers image-objects in a palimpsest of negative and positive space, lending a sense of anatomy to the seemingly banal music video.
العسل الأمريكي ونقطة على الشطر
بيت شعر
الجلد
On Liveness
“With a green screen you can keep changing the backdrop all the time, which is what I wanted. I needed a three-walled space for the movement like with the hula hooping, so I built it.” The staging of Angela’s evasive portrait bouncing off the corners of the screen enables the performer to act on the image, her projection. Yet this frame within a frame isn’t a testament to selfie culture. As her live action is edited in and out, the very notion of ‘liveness’ is put into question. It’s like watching a performance mediated through a glitch aesthetic. With ruptures in visual continuity, lags in movement appear as optical echoes or refractions, disentangling the concept of sound from its image. “It’s an escape from reality, from all the noise in the background,” Hashel adds.
فرويد - لاكان - هيغل – هايدغر
Of all the works in the show, especially the artist’s large-scale paintings and life-size sculptures that speak to a slower experience of making, 24 Degrees North is perhaps the most dizzying in speed. Time shifts and becomes non-linear in a fluid landscape of moving images that defy capture in endless loops that become colour-coded derivations of the real. In this way, Hashel turns the gaze back to the viewer, and to how we view ourselves through our screens.