Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
The Whole Truth by Lawrence Abu Hamdan is also on display in the gallerys roof top space. It is a sound and visual
installation that uses the lie detector machine as the starting point to explore the moment where the machine takes
control over a persons life, presenting the material, technological and political qualities of voice and sound.
Simultaneously Athr presented two projects that took place in Jeddahs old town. Al Mangour: Loved and Beloved by
Ahmad Angawi is a project that explores the complex structural and aesthetic forms that characterise the Mangour tradition, a craft and integral feature of Hijasi architecture. Documenting and analysing the complex woodwork patterns,
Angawi deconstructs the elements that define traditional architecture, shedding new light to the ways in which notions of
duality pertained this craft. Functionality and design, inside and outside, revealing and concealing are notions behind the
Mangour craft.
In the old part of town, Emy Kat presented a photographic exhibition from his For Mental Spaces series where he documents abandoned spaces, spaces of history that are collapsing with a nostalgic element portrayed in his large scale
prints.
Jeddah thrives with art. Galleries and independent - mostly ephemeral - spaces hosted exhibitions by younger artists,
planting new ideas in a context where they are needed most. Utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar, Jeddah unfolds
its hidden contents behind the glossy facades of unfinished shops, the irregular speed of its sprawling highways, the
permanent neglect and eternal expansion of its unique urban identity. From the permacool controlled aseptic environments to the chaotic randomness of the streets in the heat of the day, Jeddahs anarchic utopia proliferates in its
rooftops, its unregistered empty shops, the sections of the old city that rot, the disused palatial complexes that have
fallen from grace, its dark empty flats lit only by projectors at night, the makeshift nightclubs, the unknown production of
masterpieces.
The sense that concepts and artworks can undergo censorship, convert the otherwise familiar ritual of attendance to
evidence of a risk taking progress. Politics and religion, novel gender practices, fleeting images of bodies, politics,
mental maps and directions passed on on a piece of tissue paper, here they can momentarily exist, get recorded and
disappear. Old and new, permanent and temporary, official and unofficial become interchangeable almost simultaneously. In Jeddah I encountered the most intense political conversations, the most meaningful ideas by artists, curators and
gallerists, the most interesting female voices and learned lessons from them about emergencies, about how to be proactive, how to be subversive, how to be incompatible, how to be able to codify messages, how to understand the codes,
how to instigate a politics of systematic disarray and how to launch a new language in an establishment that pre-empts
all of the above.
In a city which metabolises itself in a reverse function abandoned centres undone not by industrial decline but by
continuous production of wealth, Jeddah exists in the sub-systems of the new and what is left behind. It is a buzzing
territory where brilliant solutions will softly cut, bend, tear and transform the illusion of any previously understood order.
Jeddah was an incredible surprise, and now I have become a fanatic of this citys processes, its progress, its present and
its future.
Without any hesitation, I would recommend you to experience the adrenaline of inspiration Jeddah is and Jeddah is
about to become.
Best wishes,
Vassilis