The title quoted by my mother is something she mentioned every time we moved houses.
After 28 years of living in the UAE, I am moving out for the first time, going to be living aboard for the first time. This positioning raised a few weird feelings, one primarily about the idea of home and the house as an object. I had a precarious life growing up, things were never stable and home was always something in flux, which bothered me.
For the show, home was something I thought about a lot. I drove by our first house, thinking about all the tension and memories embedded on those floors. Thinking about someday that house will be demolished and only rubble will remain.
There are a lot of sandlots around this neighbourhood, and within the sandlots there is rubble. Houses past and discards of excess construction material all live in this lot and I collected them. After twenty white tiles, I finally find several with distinct characters, a particular choice that only a few can be questioned on.
In my professions, I worked with artists who worked with mobiles and I’ve guarded museums with mobiles. This is where I thought a mobile would be a good representation of this feeling I am experiencing.
to have beginnings and ends, floating in the present.
Found house tiles, piano strings, carbon fiber rods, steel wire, wooden pegs, wheel balance weights
Looking 👀
Martin Heidegger looks at dwelling as an accommodation between people and their surroundings and that man should do three things; building, dwelling, thinking.
This got me thinking about my practice and what I do. In which this is where “Looking, dwelling, leaving” came from, My solo at the third line.
“To dwell, to be set at peace, means to remain at peace within the free, the preserve, the free sphere that safeguards each thing in its nature. The fundamental character of dwelling is this sparing and preserving. It pervades dwelling in its whole range. That range reveals itself to us as soon as we reflect that human being consists in dwelling and, indeed, dwelling in the sense of the stay of mortals on the earth.”
Looking is a work fixated on language and drive. While grocery shopping I find myself looking at notice boards of the supermarket, not with any intention other than to simply gauge what people put out public domain.
Upon looking at the boards, I found a pattern in the language of job seeker advertisements, all of them mentioned they were not “seeking”, not “interested”, not “searching” but “looking” and I found myself connected with this stranger's plea. To stay in the UAE for most third world citizens meant to be under an employment visa, I too understand this state of needing employment but also a chance to stay, to linger. I found a moment where I and this stranger shared the same method of survival, which is to look for something to continue existing.
Edited found job-seeking advertisements, archival inkjet print, pencil on paper, cork board pins, stainless steel custom notice boards
Postcards 📮
Whenever I travel, I think about found postcards and the text people shared (I am a nosy person) and it's interesting how it's a commodity of memorabilia. Still somehow in circulation for a dollar.
I have been thinking about postcards, I’ve collected a few written with pencil and found it insane one would write a postcard with a pencil. If the graphite would hold itself without being smudged on its way to the recipient.
I found a seller on Ebay who sold American used postcards, curiously I messaged him if he had any written with a pencil. I received 21 postcards in the mail, fascinated by the quality of scripture. Something I cherish, a human's distinct imprint, hard to replicate.
As growing up in the UAE, history as a concept is hard for me to grasp. There is a distance between being able to comprehend time. But I was fascinated to be able to touch the grains of a pencil from 1908 to smudge it with my town hands, to alter micro history.
Smudging was harder than I thought, the texts were generic, and I had no interest in the images. So I decided to erase the texts and turn them into something else.
Pencil-written postcards from eBay, stamps, eraser, artist frame
Keys 🔑
I see most of the work in my practice as a game, a curiosity that keeps me tempted to do something every day.
One day, while walking to work I found a pair of keys on a ledge, I waited a few days to give the owner the chance to collect his belongings. On the fifth day, my impatience grew stronger, on a lunch break I took the keys to a key shop and made myself a copy.
After placing the key back, the next day the original was finally gone.
Now the game has begun. I have something to look forward to, my eyes always on the floors and the crevices of the city. Collecting keys and making copies of them.
As an artist I felt, that copying the keys wasn't laborious enough. I remained stuck with my copies.
Until working with an artist at work, when she introduced a foreign object into her practice she would use fabric and weave her mother's native Caribbean craft onto this object and I watched a type of mending happen between the artist and this object.
So I took my keys and spent hours on YouTube learning various keychain knots, to assert some care, to mend my distance with these objects.
Using an industrial key box, I hung all these keys, almost treating it like a shrine. The box had a sheet of paper to help identify the keys, and on it, I listed out their potential.
This work most definitely nodes to all the Palestinians and Palestinian artists who highlighted how significant a key is.
Copy of found keys, print on glass, hand-tied keychains, pen on paper, FIS key box
Alone 🧍♀️
One day I walking down a busy street and found this card under my nose. Usually in the UAE if there’s a card on the floor, it’s most likely for prostitution. Though this card stood out, I thought some creative agency attempted to make something interesting.
“ALONE” and a phone number is so powerful, is this a statement? a question?, a person?.
Am I alone? lonely?
The curiosity proceeds with a WhatsApp conversation and the conclusion is not so productive. Nevertheless, I like to share my experiences with the city, whether the outcome is something fruitful for a practice or not. For the work, the custom-made frame that is handpainted nodes to a floor I saw, interlocks bricks have been covered over by cement and then once more and then someone cracked it open to reveal the bricks.
I felt that was a beautiful visual metaphor for what I do in my practice and in the city.
Pencil on paper, acrylic on wood, artist frame
