Curated by Dalia Al-Dujaili, Independent Curator, and Rachel Cieśla, Lead Creative at the Simon Lee Foundation, the exhibition takes its title from a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and brings together works that look beyond the familiar narratives of conflict and crisis. Because we see this kind of nuanced, multifaceted representation as particularly important to the MENA discourse today, we asked some questions to the curators about the exhibition, its approach, and the artists it brings together.
The artists come from very different contexts, but you identify a shared “relation to pressure” between their practices. What does this pressure refer to, and why did it become an important point of connection for the exhibition?
Rachel Cieśla: Pressure is a useful word because it names something that happens to us but also inside of us. I was interested in the way these artists make images from that point of tension: when social, political, emotional or historical forces become almost too much, and something has to give. These artists are working in very different places and from very different positions, but their images all seem to understand that a ‘decisive moment’ can happen under pressure. Something builds, intensifies, and then there is an ecstatic release. The release might be pleasure, humour, violence, absurdity, beauty, desire. It might last fifteen seconds. It might be a photograph. And then it is gone.
That felt particularly important to me because of the condition of photography now. We tend to think of photography as a medium that captures something that has already happened — Barthes’s that-has-been. But we became increasingly interested in the possibility of a photograph that isn’t really about the past at all. What if the image is oriented entirely forwards? What if it is less a record of what was than a temporary symbolic gesture towards something that doesn’t yet have a social form?
That is what we see happening across these practices. The artists aren’t necessarily trying to reveal reality to us. They are making reality unstable enough that another possibility can briefly appear. Mohamad Abdouni’s photographs are a good example, his subjects make these tiny claims on the world through a glance, a touch, a pose. There is romance and melancholy, playfulness and despair, all happening at once. The image doesn’t resolve any of those things. It simply gives them a moment in which to exist and I think that is political. Not because the artists are necessarily making political statements but because they create spaces in which something can appear that the surrounding conditions don’t easily permit.