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Seven artistic journeys charted throughout a three-month art residency are being explored in the new Reality and Its Shadow exhibition, running until March 14.
The art exhibition at Al Riwaq Art Space is the fruit of the labours of artists in its ‘Application 002’ residency programme.
The seven creatives who are showcasing their work are Ahmed Ashoor, Omnia Elamir, Sarah Aradi, Jaafar Al Haddad, Aziz Mutawa, Mariam Al Sadadi and Rawan Alhosani.
“The residency provided the artists a platform for negotiation, avenues of awareness, and promoting dialogue,” a spokesperson for Al Riwaq said, in a statement.
“Throughout the three-month residency, the artists were invited to explore and contest individual concepts within a collaborative format.
“Each work invites the viewer into complex, diverse and significant historical events, people, and sources.”
For 27-year-old Omnia, the 12-week-long residency offered an opportunity for her to take her love for art more seriously and make it a practice.
In her sculpture I Never Could Talk to You, she explores the collective experience of womanhood, with the title drawing inspiration from Sylvia Plath’s poem Daddy.
She critiqued patriarchal dominance, embodying tension between feminine and masculine energies through material contrasts. The central element is an enlarged Scold’s Bridle—a 16th-century instrument of punishment used in England and its colonies for scolding a woman, consisting of an iron framework for the head and a sharp metal gag for restraining the tongue—housing a show of a contorted female figure, symbolising historical and contemporary oppression.
“The artwork poignantly addresses the ongoing global struggles of women, depicting the weight of cultural coercion and the modern dilemma where women, despite seeming liberated, face invisible constraints from societal indoctrination,” Omnia added.
“The bent-over figure, seemingly on the verge of escape, creates a pervasive entrapment akin to a cage, emphasising the enduring challenges women confront in decision-making about their bodies worldwide.”
Meanwhile, Ahmed’s video-based art piece Variations #1-#6 explored individual and collective definitions of masculinity with a video depicting a “micro-gestural” language between men that showcases equilibrium, expression, motion, listening, gazing and ownership.
The 27-year-old put together an ensemble of actors including himself, Adam Mohamed, Mohamed Rasool, Fares Zubari and Yousif Zuwayed for the piece, which had sound composed by Mahmood Sharif and photography directed and edited by Husain Foolath.
“I came into the residency thinking I’d be making solo work, but I realised by the end that having a community-based practice is something that is quite critical to the work I make,” he explained.
“That is the true gift of any residency — to have more clarity and purpose in your creative practice than you did coming into it, regardless of what the final piece is.”
Sarah was moved by the violence in the world and worked through a range of research and study of the history of the subject to come up with her pieces, collectively titled Adaptive Disclosure. Instead of outrightly rejecting violence, her work tries to study and accept its nature, through two pieces titled What He Said and What She Said.
“I had to invent a coping mechanism that helped me digest the vast amounts of violence that surround us nowadays,” she explained.
“Inspired by medieval scripts, sarcasm through text and illustrations helped me dilute such a heavy topic while shedding a light on the blurred lines.”
Rawan turned her attention inwards to move her artistic journey forward, with paper and video piece titled Shredding.
Her video portrays restlessness and anxiety, capturing the coping mechanisms that people go through to process these emotions.
“My artwork seeks to capture these responses, juxtaposing the violence of inefficient and minisculely methodical destruction of paper with the soft, calming aftermath of hand-shredded paper fragments,” she explained.
“Metaphorically reflecting the mentally deteriorating nature of severe anxiety and restlessness, the piece unveils the paradoxical journey to inner calm through painfully aggressive, repetitive tasks.
“Offering a glimpse into the oxymoronic and disorderly state of self, the artwork prompts viewers to contemplate the multifaceted nature of restlessness within themselves.”
For Mariam, exploring the nature of time and how capitalism has changed the human understanding of the idea became the crux of her creation, Unforgiving Pace.
Using non-absorbent Yupo paper, she depicted herself in various seated positions. With each position, she questioned performances of everyday life imposed by capitalist momentum, seeking to embody stillness amidst constant sensory overload, emphasising that time is not a linear concept but rather a sensory one.
Aziz’s video and accompanying sound piece This is the Altar in Reverse, explores the connection between land and spirituality, by comparing an abandoned construction site built on reclaimed land to a sacred altar.
“These abandoned ‘non-sites’ are never neutral and contain a multitude of gestures and symbols that encapsulate our relationships to the land,” he emphasised.
“The video and accompanying sound piece propose to bridge a temporal gap where concrete pillars are visualised as ruins of the past, interventions of the present, and artefacts of the future all at once.
Jaafar’s steel and cotton paper art installation spoke about the history and nature of journalism in Bahrain, in a piece titled A Cultural Move.
The exhibition continues until March 14, as the next batch of residents for the programme begin their process of exploration and research.
For more details, follow @alriwaq on Instagram.
