One More Story
Guide text, Vänersborgs konsthall, 2019
New Place of Origin (2009), In Limbo (2010), Human Conditions (2015) and From a Distance (2016)
What would it mean to experience our own privileged lives as inextricably tied to the exposed lives of less fortunate others elsewhere in the world?
Under the threat of war, as thousands of families fled their homelands, a mother of twin infants set out to find a safer place, crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat on the deadliest route to Europe. During the journey, one of the twins died. She kept the dead child with her, even when the smugglers tried to force her to throw the body into the sea. One night, while she was asleep, the smugglers took action. When she woke, her living child was gone. They had mistakenly thrown the sleeping twin into the sea. This story is central to One More Story. Although it is told in words, it is overflowing with images. It shows the kind of forces that have shaped my work over many years: a story I hear, a memory I revisit, a photograph of war, or an event that stays with me longer than I expected.
Are my drawings political? Undoubtedly, yes. As Ai Weiwei has said, "if somebody questions reality, truth, facts; [it] always becomes a political act." But I am less interested in defining "political art" than in how a work comes to engage with political issues: the stages before it is shown, and how the artist has lived before, during and after making it.
My works begin as an attempt to hold on to a personal experience, or to individual and collective memories. For my BA degree show in the UK, I made eleven drawings, In Limbo (2010), and the video installation New Place of Origin (2009). They grew out of ten years of seeking asylum in the UK and struggling to obtain an official identity card. As Michel Foucault said, "we have to create ourselves as a work of art." I began by taking an ID-style photograph of myself, filming the process and turning the photograph into a large drawing. Making the drawing was a way to become visible. The project then led me to others in similar situations: people displaced by war, spending years waiting for a decision that would shape their lives.
Human Conditions (2015) works with violent images from the news. William Kentridge describes the studio as a kind of brain, where everything outside comes in: history, politics, the morning newspaper, an image from the television, a conversation from a week before. From five such photographs, I made nine drawings and 99 intaglio prints, In the Name Of. The works place hands holding human bodies between two kinds of cut: a cut to give birth and a cut to slaughter.
For my MFA degree show at Göteborgs Konsthall, From a Distance (2016), I returned to the story of the mother and her twins, which I had heard retold in refugee accommodation around Gothenburg. Here I chose images with only slight hints of violence, almost invisible. Viewers were given only the titles and the story, printed on the back of cards, as clues.
While I was making these drawings, on 28 January 2016, 25 refugees, 10 of them children, were found dead off the Greek island of Samos. My partner lost eleven close family members in this tragedy. Some of them are still missing. The story on the back of the card had become real for my own family. In Monument, I built a drawing from eleven layers of pencil, charcoal and graphite powder. In each layer, I wrote one of the eleven names of our lost family members, then fixed and covered it, until the drawing became an almost black sheet of paper: a monument that could be placed in the sea, a landscape that hides its own history.
What do the drawings in One More Story do? They reveal an absence. They make us ask what the person in the drawing might be feeling, thinking or carrying. As soon as we learn the story, our attention shifts from the drawing to the event behind it. The viewer is drawn into a dialogue, and into the trauma embedded at the heart of the object. Perhaps we all live inside our own personal and collective memories. When we turn them into visual form, we try to share them, to recognise one another and to find a way out of struggle.
It's Your Turn Doctor, 2018
Video, 20 min,
Filmed by the artist at Restad Gård and in the Vänersborg area, December 2017 – March 2018.
The film's title refers to the anti-Assad graffiti "It's your turn, Doctor", written on a school wall in Daraa, in southwest Syria near the Jordanian border, in early 2011. In response, the authorities arrested, imprisoned and tortured at least 15 schoolboys from the city. These events became the first spark of the Syrian uprising, which set off demonstrations against Bashar al-Assad across the country.
It's Your Turn Doctor invites audiences to listen to Mohammed Al Maani's first-person account of events in Daraa. It follows the anger and hope of 2011 through to the multi-sided civil war of 2013.
The work was commissioned for the exhibition Drone Vision: Surveillance, Warfare, Protest at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (19 May – 16 September 2018). Drone Vision was a two-year research project led by Dr. Sarah Tuck, a collaboration between Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, and the Hasselblad Foundation. It explored what drone technologies mean for photography and human rights.
Guide text, Vänersborgs konsthall, 2019
New Place of Origin (2009), In Limbo (2010), Human Conditions (2015) and From a Distance (2016)
What would it mean to experience our own privileged lives as inextricably tied to the exposed lives of less fortunate others elsewhere in the world?
Under the threat of war, as thousands of families fled their homelands, a mother of twin infants set out to find a safer place, crossing the Mediterranean Sea by boat on the deadliest route to Europe. During the journey, one of the twins died. She kept the dead child with her, even when the smugglers tried to force her to throw the body into the sea. One night, while she was asleep, the smugglers took action. When she woke, her living child was gone. They had mistakenly thrown the sleeping twin into the sea. This story is central to One More Story. Although it is told in words, it is overflowing with images. It shows the kind of forces that have shaped my work over many years: a story I hear, a memory I revisit, a photograph of war, or an event that stays with me longer than I expected.
Are my drawings political? Undoubtedly, yes. As Ai Weiwei has said, "if somebody questions reality, truth, facts; [it] always becomes a political act." But I am less interested in defining "political art" than in how a work comes to engage with political issues: the stages before it is shown, and how the artist has lived before, during and after making it.
My works begin as an attempt to hold on to a personal experience, or to individual and collective memories. For my BA degree show in the UK, I made eleven drawings, In Limbo (2010), and the video installation New Place of Origin (2009). They grew out of ten years of seeking asylum in the UK and struggling to obtain an official identity card. As Michel Foucault said, "we have to create ourselves as a work of art." I began by taking an ID-style photograph of myself, filming the process and turning the photograph into a large drawing. Making the drawing was a way to become visible. The project then led me to others in similar situations: people displaced by war, spending years waiting for a decision that would shape their lives.
Human Conditions (2015) works with violent images from the news. William Kentridge describes the studio as a kind of brain, where everything outside comes in: history, politics, the morning newspaper, an image from the television, a conversation from a week before. From five such photographs, I made nine drawings and 99 intaglio prints, In the Name Of. The works place hands holding human bodies between two kinds of cut: a cut to give birth and a cut to slaughter.
For my MFA degree show at Göteborgs Konsthall, From a Distance (2016), I returned to the story of the mother and her twins, which I had heard retold in refugee accommodation around Gothenburg. Here I chose images with only slight hints of violence, almost invisible. Viewers were given only the titles and the story, printed on the back of cards, as clues.
While I was making these drawings, on 28 January 2016, 25 refugees, 10 of them children, were found dead off the Greek island of Samos. My partner lost eleven close family members in this tragedy. Some of them are still missing. The story on the back of the card had become real for my own family. In Monument, I built a drawing from eleven layers of pencil, charcoal and graphite powder. In each layer, I wrote one of the eleven names of our lost family members, then fixed and covered it, until the drawing became an almost black sheet of paper: a monument that could be placed in the sea, a landscape that hides its own history.
What do the drawings in One More Story do? They reveal an absence. They make us ask what the person in the drawing might be feeling, thinking or carrying. As soon as we learn the story, our attention shifts from the drawing to the event behind it. The viewer is drawn into a dialogue, and into the trauma embedded at the heart of the object. Perhaps we all live inside our own personal and collective memories. When we turn them into visual form, we try to share them, to recognise one another and to find a way out of struggle.
It's Your Turn Doctor, 2018
Video, 20 min,
Filmed by the artist at Restad Gård and in the Vänersborg area, December 2017 – March 2018.
The film's title refers to the anti-Assad graffiti "It's your turn, Doctor", written on a school wall in Daraa, in southwest Syria near the Jordanian border, in early 2011. In response, the authorities arrested, imprisoned and tortured at least 15 schoolboys from the city. These events became the first spark of the Syrian uprising, which set off demonstrations against Bashar al-Assad across the country.
It's Your Turn Doctor invites audiences to listen to Mohammed Al Maani's first-person account of events in Daraa. It follows the anger and hope of 2011 through to the multi-sided civil war of 2013.
The work was commissioned for the exhibition Drone Vision: Surveillance, Warfare, Protest at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg (19 May – 16 September 2018). Drone Vision was a two-year research project led by Dr. Sarah Tuck, a collaboration between Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg, and the Hasselblad Foundation. It explored what drone technologies mean for photography and human rights.