Nature in Flight, Exodus, Life in Circles and Mutations are the four chapters of the winning group exhibition of the NUR 2024 call for entries at Casa Árabe, organized in collaboration with PhotoEspaña. Under the general title Ephemeral Landscapes of the Sun, nine artists from Africa and the Middle East, born in the 1980s and 1990s, demonstrate their impressive artistic vitality. Roger Anis, M’hammed Kilito, Salih Basheer, Imane Djamil, Ebti Nabag, Yumma Al Arashi, Tanya Habjouqa, Abdallah Al Khatib and Leila Chaini make up the cast. All of them capture in their images stories of illusions to find solutions to conflicts and deprivations and emotionally charged exits.
The works, selected and installed by the exhibition’s curators, Analía Iglesias and Irene Díaz, are intended as a demonstration of what they call “perpetual motion.” In this way they allude to the fact that in Arab societies everything is in motion, although sometimes the mirrors remain still. In the waiting, there are those who are used to the fleeting. in destruction and reconstruction; in the game of drafts on a makeshift table in the Medina. in the rebirth of each day at a souk stall, putting the items housed every night back on sale. Because the street is also a landscape of ephemeral architecture. “And knowing that nothing is eternal is part of knowledge,” they say.
Starting from the first section of the exhibition, Nature on the run is represented by the Nile and the oases of the Maghreb. After the shock of an ancient drought, the great river of the African continent has continued to meander majestically, although only two of its seven branches remain, perhaps because it receives all kinds of polluting factories on its banks, shrinking faster than would be desirable .
Little by little, the sustainable crops on the terraces of this and other rivers, and the date palms that in the oases barely needed a few drops of water to become giants, were replaced by unsustainable ambitions. The agri-food industry has become unstoppable and destructive.
Exodus presents the work of the Sudanese Salih Badheer and the Moroccan Imane Djamil, who depict the movements, pursuits and descents of those who escape from some hell or decide to throw themselves into the sea without a net. This chapter of the exhibition exclusively includes part of the series ‘Slow Days on the Lucky Island’, a graphic story about the migratory relationship between Tarfaya, Morocco, and Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands.
Life in a circle. Or, in other words, being cornered in a confined space, with no way out. In Ebti Nabag’s images, the women who support their families thanks to small street shops in Khartoum are forced to run in circles. The artist connects a component of the social fabric in Sudan, tea, with the difficulties of the market, inflation and the resilience of these people, who always carry on.
And finally, the exhibition closes with Mutations to lose fear, or rather fears, from the perspective of Yumna Al-Arashi, Tanya Habjouqa and Leila Chaibi. Women telling the story of women’s lives. They carry on their shoulders the burden of certain traditions that prevent them from emancipating their desire. The reflection offered to them is often a still photograph, but the mirrors of their own sexuality contain dynamism. And something is moving today. even some men participate in the tribute that saves the courage of the pioneers.
One is left with the impression of having seen how the tangible meets the ancestral, poetic and mystical world. A transformation that can make it easier to lose one’s fears, to make issues like gender and identity more flexible and, in short, to trust joy and life.
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