The Island
A look at the artwork that frames the entry point of Warehouse421’s exhibition of Hashel Al Lamki’s work in The Cup and the Saucer, curated by Munira Al Sayegh. Nadine Khalil sits with both artist and curator to reflect on three-dimensional paintings, preserved bananas, and endless regeneration.
The Cup and the Saucer is an exercise in magnitude. With over 100 works, including life-sized sculptures, viewfinders, and paintings of different scales, a starting point is key. Although this is arguably the video 24 Degrees North, which is the first work the artist discussed with the curator, it was also the last to be completed and according to Hashel Al Lamki, as his first foray into a new medium, isn’t shown in its entirety. “I see it as a sketch of something larger,” Hashel says. “There is considerable material that didn’t make it into the piece.” This is emblematic of what is at play in Warehouse421 of newly commissioned work, some of which have been reconstituted. Hashel is a prolific artist whose output demonstrates more what lies at the edges of completion than precise beginnings or endings.
Take The Island, which is the first work you encounter, a mixed-media piece that refuses demarcation. A felt carpet, made of alpaca fleece collected when Hashel was studying in New York, references Abu Dhabi’s geography in a flattened sculpture of tufts. Hashel found the fragmented frames (that multiply in the upper left corner) in a pile on the beach in Abu Dhabi. “I have no idea who dumped them there,” he says. “The Island is made up of all kinds of individual hairs coming together to make a piece. I collect and connect things, gather different threads to build a story around them, and essentially try to figure out what it all means… When I picked up the banana three years ago, I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I kept it on my desk, like a wedding souvenir, facing the sun.
In Desert Islands, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze proposes that the dream of the island is akin to “being already separate, far from any continent, of being lost and alone – or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew. Some islands drifted away from the continent, but the island is also that toward which one drifts; other islands originated in the ocean, but the island is also the origin, radical and absolute.”
Despite the attempts to define Hashel Al Lamki’s latest work at Warehouse421, it exists between registers and dualities. It spills over points of departure in permutations that elevate everyday materials. His practice of amalgamation and recomposition breaks things down into their constituent parts – flickering lights, faceless mannequins, massage cards, popcorn in a stack – like the bones that form infrastructure. The singular units cannot be fully extricated without the whole or aggregate collapsing, but they can also function on their own, in the spaces that exist between the individual and the collective, or the island and its environs. That’s where the magic happens.
The blackened banana hanging inside the frame comes from another work, the room-sized banana installation by Gu Dexin presented at Abu Dhabi Art. Though it’s hard to look at a banana these days without thinking of other satirical interpretations such as Cattelan’s $120,000 Comedian at Art Basel Miami last year or Andy Warhol’s iconic 1966 banana album cover for Velvet Underground, Hashel doesn’t reference these contemporary art contexts. In fact, he doesn’t seem at all concerned with what is ‘original’ or the source material. He is more interested in how things replicate and transform – the endless applications of what is discarded. Decay is equated with preservation.
“The banana is also a symbol of the infinite,” Munira says. “The way Hashel reused it alludes to the cycle of rebirth. It’s a process that doesn’t end, like the unbounded frames, or the nail clippers which refer to somethingthat's part of your body and constantly regenerating. The Island sets the stage for the theme Birth and Earth. If Birth is the beginning of time, then Earth represents the infinite; it will continue to exist regardless of what happens to us.”
The perishables and non-perishables in Hashel’s sculptures – perfume packages, pharmaceutical boxes, glass bottles, and more – are repurposed in a comment on excess, our excesses, but there’s also a nod towards material redress in his impulse to retain and reinvent the detritus of society. “The first time I attempted a three-dimensional work– it was still within the realm of 2D, like a relief trying to extend out of its surface– I kept adding things on, like used cans of condensed milk. I didn’t even know what canvas was then,” Hashel notes. “I was painting on wood, and even metal. I kept adding things on, like used cans of condensed milk. That was way before I knew much about art.”
The Island hearkens back to this early, instinctive work, with a multiplicity of sources interlaced. “So many parts of the world came together to make this island: felt from New York, frames imported to Abu Dhabi, nail clippers from India. The chain holding the banana is from Cairo. I didn’t question every component of the piece – they all coexist – but to some extent, as a species, we all use and interact with these objects no matter where we are.” It’s an interesting visual treatise on consumption as all-pervasive and ungrounded. A placelessness that manifests in The Island’s solid blue strip of sea.
(Process Images courtesy of the artist)
