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 2
A visual essay in accelerated time and the incoherence of our moment, 24 Degrees North unravels with a pace akin to that temporary lapse before things resume. In part two of her mediated analysis, Nadine Khalil unpacks how this plays out through a time-based lens of nostalgic forms.
*Arabic text by Hashel Al Lamki, Google audio translations in English
Nostalgia is rather uncanny. On the one hand, it represents a looking back, a longing for another time or place, and on the other it’s the sense of what can no longer be – in the present or future. In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia is the desire for a different time, a rebellion against modernity and progress – a time outside time. “The nostalgic desires to turn history into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refuse to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
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Playback
In 24 Degrees North, nostalgic undertones are twofold. Firstly, through the iconic singer Thekra’s voice (Thekra also means memory or memorial) and the artist’s recollection of listening to her as an adolescent before her tragic death. It commemorates a personal and collective histories. “She was brutally murdered by her husband,” Hashel says, “and this is a song of total surrender.” Secondly, it occupies the space of pre-internet music videos while applying post-internet DIY aesthetics. “Hashel was very interested in music videos and the ways in which they are interpreted by different cultures,” curator Munira Al Sayegh adds. “They were always playing in the background of our meetings – he would watch carefully and take notes.”
In this context, video as a medium enables the technology of remembering. It moves from “evoking real-time experiences to fragmented memory-like structures,” as Helen Westgeest puts it in Video Art Theory. It plays a recording of what has already occurred, and so exists between time(s). Hashel’s video resonates with this consciousness of time-compression, couched in the notion of the screensaver.
اِنْفِصال، فِرَاق، اِنْقِطَاع، تَوَقُّف، تَخَلُّص، نَجَاة، تَفَرُّق، تَبَدُّد، تَقَاطُع، تَهَاجُر، إِبْتِعَاد عَنْ، إِفْتِراق، بَتّ، بَتْر، بَضْع، بُعْد، تَخَلٍّ غَنْ، تَرْك، تَفْريق، شِقَاق، طَلاق، فَصْل، فُرْقَة، فِرَاق، قَطْع، مُفَارَقَة، إِبْتِعَاد عَنْ، إِعْتِزال، تَخَلٍّ عَنْ، رَحيل، قَطِيعَة، مُجَافاة، مُغادَرَة، مُفَارَقَة، مُقَاطَعَة، نُزُوح، هَجْر، هِجْران
Parallel Universe
“What a screensaver does is suck you into an image of the Maldives while you are in the middle of your corporate life, and clocked in,” curator Munira Al Sayegh says. “It describes a dream state or an alternate reality… we wanted to create that dream state – in a fleeting way.” Interestingly, Boym considers the superimposition of the dream and everyday life as part of nostalgia’s cinematic image. It’s an image of double exposure, of home and estrangement. “The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface,” she writes.
Freeze Frame
Yet in Hashel’s work, the cinematic aspect of nostalgia isn’t always in motion. It also emerges through static forms in the exhibition, such as with his room full of painted renditions of film posters from the Egyptian movie industry and its Golden Age. Featuring staged portraits of a childhood friend, they symbolize a failed dream to become a movie director in relics of time.
In the Almost Home group show the artist curated himself, he unpacks these spaces of belonging and childhood through sense of ‘home’ in Arabic (Al watan), which, incorporating the political and geographic ramifications of nationhood, goes beyond the embodiment of physical space. In its essence, nostalgia here is intertwined with the roots of the first language, the language of dreams.
الهروب بين السما وأرض الأحلام
Space-time
When the dream for home (as a space, recoverable) unravels as the dream of childhood (as a time, unrecoverable), resurrected through Thekra’s voice, the soundtrack of youth, we come full circle. Something irreparable – a death, the impossibility of homecoming – is brought to life. As video artist Nam June Paik notes in his essay Input-time and Output-time, “Once on videotape, you are not allowed to die.” More than that, 24 Degrees North points to the significance of nostalgia as an artistic device that isn’t just retrospective, but also a projection of future utopia. “The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future,” Boym writes. “Unlike melancholia, which confines itself to the planes of individual consciousness, nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.” By tracing these intersecting trajectories, Hashel situates himself between registers and the past looks like the future.