In Light of the Land and its Shadows

Organised by BACA, a group show by Jumana Emil Abboud, rana elnemr and Shadi Habib Allah. Curated by Maha Maamoun.

Bonnenfanten Museum, Maastricht. The Netherlands. May - Sep, 2019. All installation shots on this page by Harry Heuts.

Works exhibited: A group of Eenbes Tell. Hand-printed & bound artist book. 2019. In and out of Connection #1. Text, handprinted with silkscreens. 2014. The shaft. 16mm film transferred to video. 2014. The Living Object 2. Sculpture of metal, light & plants. 2016. The Blue Hose #1 , #2, #3. 8mm film transferred to video. 2012. Assembled in Streams of Synonyms: The Map. Photography. 2014. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Photography. 2014. It Became known now that King Marriout has a Library. Installation of wallpaper, photography & audio. 2014.

For access to The shaft or The Blue Hose #1,#2,#3. on vimeo, please contact the artist.

BACA Projects is a collaborative project of the Bonnefantenmuseum and the Jan van Eyck Academie on the occasion of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA) 2019, won by Lebanese artist Marwan Rechmaoui. 

Maamoun’s exhibtion In Light of the Land and its Shadows aims to build upon, comment or deconstruct a motive from the main BACA show. The participating artists are Jumana Emil Abboud, Shadi Habib Allah and Rana ElNemr, and in their works they approach the history of place through the narratives embedded in the land and its animate and inanimate inhabitants. Through mediums ranging from drawing, painting, photography, video to sculpture, and languages weaving the documentary and the mythical, the talented artists’ works invite us to expand our perceptions of place. 

Rana ElNemr stayed at the Jan van Eyck Academie for a 1-month residency, working together with the Lab for Nature Research and the Printing & Publishing Lab on new work that will be presented in the exhibition. 

On May 24, together with Maamoun, Jumana Emil Abboud and Rana ElNemr will share their experience and talk about their work. Three texts about the works of the participating artists, written by Van Eyck alumna Abla el Bahwary, will be read to the public.

Text by Lina Attalah.

IA shaft introduces a certain kind of light, that ray that colors the way we see. It also introduces perspective, another possible entry point to seeing. It does so from its position as a negative space, opening up the question of what meaning does space index in the genealogy of its trajectory, from inception to an evolving matter responding to how it is being lived. As such, the shaft is both a space and a lens. Like the shaft, a lamppost also introduces light, that which produces a shadow, and hence also perspective. Between them, lie multiple streams emanating from and around different captures of spaces. ​In light of the land and its shadows,​ artist Rana ElNemr grapples with ways of seeing in general, and ways of seeing spaces in particular. Born out of previous configurations, like ​Assembled in streams of synonyms​ in Cairo’s Sharjah Art Gallery (2015), and ​A chapter of synonyms​ in Beirut Art Center (2017), this new exhibition of works recreates some of the experiences surrounding them, and meanings associated with them, in their new, temporary site.

In her subject matter of inquiry, the artist invites us to imagine processes of transformation from what Henri Lefebvre coined as the absolute, untampered space to the produced space, which flows and meanings are socially associated. Without intending it, her works follow through his dialectic threads on space; between what we perceive, how we conceive it as per a family of references we are used to, and finally, how we actually live it. With agility and fluidity, she moves between different perspectives, and across different mediums, that, with everything above, elucidate over and again, one question: How do we know?

The ​shaft​ is a source of light primarily, but in a local Egyptian context, the Arabic word [​manwar]​ is used to mean many other things; from a residential dump, to the class structure assignment of doormen to poor housing, to the spot overlooked by balcony ropes laden with laundry. It is the center of houses and it’s the negative space around which there is the positive space. Energy comes out of the center, the positive space, while the negative is outside, in a reversal of the relation between positive and negative. Pigeons move vertically, with the horizontal houses’ surrounding of the shaft; a circular activity that evokes possibilities of meanings. Sensations and meanings populate these movements;

they revamp the space and are revamped by it. This shift between space-to-meaning and meaning-to-space is an active presence in Rana ElNemr’s practice. Going back and forth between meaning and space, and space and meaning, there are rare moments when some elements come in sync. In these moments, new or more articulate meanings emerge, or an additional sensation on the edge of a perception or experience.

A map, ​the map,​ can be a site of such sensations too, with the reservoir of information it contains, but also missing spots and unclear indications. It has always been one of the vehicles of perception to the gaps between a space and its representation, the gaps that open up sites of imagination. Mapping is a point of departure for Rana ElNemr in her practice, a ground for perspective that somewhat launches and structures her inquiry. In doing so, she appropriates the dark spots a map leaves us with; the moment where the conflation of reality with its representation becomes impossible. She dwells on this moment or asks us to do so.

In doing so, she also questions institutions of knowledge. For long, dictionaries have assumed the authority of casting meaning, and Rana ElNemr’s unsettles this by bringing up Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s ​The Dictionary of Imaginary Places ​as a book not consumed for its content, but for its materiality as a form. The book indexes epistemologies of knowledge, how language creates meaning but also is pierced through for new meanings.

But Rana ElNemr doesn’t stay at the surface of form and what it indexes. In ​It Became Known that King Marriout Now Has a Library, ​she digs in. In the sound piece that is part of the work, we hear Professor Mohamed Dowidar who moves away from the city with his wife to create a place that he custom-designs and builds himself with some help. Professor Dowidar speaks about the land he acquired to build his house on in some deserted area in the west coast of Egypt and how with rainfall, this land would be “covered like a rug filled with colors of wild flowers.” In his picturesque descriptions, played out in the orality of the account, we see the trajectory of his imagining building a home surrounded by a forest and following through his imagination. Professor Dowidar then builds a library with books on everything from agriculture, to filmmaking and music because he believes in the unitarian nature of human knowledge, the kind of unison that every human should carry as they go about endeavoring in their own experience. In this work, Rana ElNemr takes us on an auditory sensory journey, to experiment with the possibility of summoning curiosities and seeing through the words of a narrator who starts telling his story by speaking about his library, another institution of knowledge. The artist has a track record of not only giving in to intuitive curiosities in developing her inquiry, but putting these curiosities on display. In her previous work, ​Depot [​ 2014], she navigates it with a certain wanderlust, “a place that is almost deserted,” she says...

There is no thread of thoughts or narrative. There is no road or specific itineraries to follow. You are in the middle of something where everything seems like everything, with so many imaginative moments from childhood and possibilities for making your own world inside the space. Following a butterfly, as clichéd as this may sound, may be the type of instigator for curiosity in such a space.

But ​It Became Known That King Marriout Now Has a Library​, is also about the aforementioned shift between space-to-meaning and meaning-to-space, captured through the evolution from initial imaginations to actualities of use. In the case of the space at hand in this work, there is gradual shift in its use from a house with a garden for a family of five, whose personal bookshelves outgrew their living space, to the building, with its versatility making more sense as a library than a family house. A mirroring or contrasting space is that embodied in​ The Khan [​ 2014-15]. Originally belonging to a context of large-scale 1990s development projects in Egypt, this project that was initially set to serve as a family entertainment spot, was loaded with a vision to combine heritage and commercialization, a vision accentuated in the distinctive branding and marketing techniques of that period. Yet, the failing of this vision to be embodied by the produced space meant its metamorphosis, when it is not dormant, into a closed shooting plateau, film-sets and celebrity car-racing activities for a television program called ​Adrenaline.​ It is as though the act of space production was too forced that it couldn’t leave the field of the stage to become a lived reality. The two works present us with notions of speculation, a field of agency and re-use, which is a product of both intention, but also organic, spontaneous and unplanned morphing. Her inquisitive approach to both also put us in front of her persistent question: How do we see through spaces and objects the genealogies of their reconfigurations? And how do we learn differently when rendered aware of these genealogies beyond the immediate experience of seeing?

Knowledge, or the making of meaning, takes on another experiential level in ​The Living Object. H​ ere, the artist is a designer transfiguring a street object, a lamppost, altering its functions and cultivating crops within it. Resembling its existence in its natural environment, the crops of ​The Living Object​ remind of folks climbing over lampposts on the streets at night in a gesture that defaces the limited formal purpose of the structure. For long, informal uses have preoccupied Rana ElNemr and have come up in her repertoire.
But in this work, she grapples with what functions are loaded onto a street furniture once it is taken to a gallery space, and what functions are dropped. Here too, ​The Living Object produces light, but more precisely, creates a shadow of the plant it harbors on the wall. With the plant growing according to the rules of nature, it constantly changes the shadow

and expands the sculpture into the dimension of time. How much more do we see when we see an object unfolding not once, but twice, in both its three-dimensional reality and it’s two dimensional reproduction? And what does it tell us about representation, that intellectual labor, but also personal tendency accompanying us everywhere we go? Over and again, Rana ElNemr invites us to see. To see through. But this time around, she does it by tampering with an artistic form loaded with its own history, namely sculpture. Rana ElNemr’s approach to sculpture challenges the grandiosity that can be associated with it as the form of the real. Instead, it is an investigation of three-dimensionality as a lens of representation, of which we see iterations in her previous works like ​The Balcony Series [2002-ongoing] and ​The Olympic Garden​ [2009-2010].

I started with the simplest elements within a medium, like a sketch, note or photograph. Then while working, a build-up happened in the form of layers, in the form of expanding the limits of the medium I started with, and/or in adding a new medium.

Captions

1. The Living Object #2.​ 2017​. S​ culpture, plants, light fixture

2. Installation Shot, Foreground: ​The Living Object #2.​ 2017​ ​Sculpture, plants, light

   fixture​. ​Background:​ The Shaft. 2​ 013-14. 16mm film transferred to video.

3. The Map.​ 2013. C-Print on Archival Paper, Hand-drawn garden plan.

4. Depot​. 2014. C-Print on Archival Paper.

5. The Khan.​ 2014-15. C-Print on Archival Paper.

6. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.​ 2014. C-Print on Archival Paper.

7& 8. ​It became known that King Marriout now has a Library​. 2014. C-Print on Archival Paper.
9. ​It became known that King Marriout now has a Library: The Library at Night​. 2014. Photography on Vinyl Wallpaper.