Vessels

07.09.19 – 05.10.19

Almine Rech Paris

This exhibition is an immersive installation of wall works, drawings, and a film titled The Reading Room.

The first room of the exhibition contains Conductive Bodies (2019) a process-oriented series of abstract wall-hung sculptures made from incising clothing pattern-like forms from copper sheets and connecting sharp cut out forms with thin thread to create abstract shapes held by precarious tension.

In the following room, one encounters the film, The Reading Room, a poetic and fragmented meditation on the question of home and identity as abstract ideas and questions: what does it mean to return to or search for something you never experienced? The Reading Room is filmed in the Edward Said Reading Room at Columbia University in New York City, which houses the personal library of the late Palestinian intellectual and theorist. The main footage of a young boy waking up in the library and stuttering as he attempts to read, is cut with archival photographs and animations of a boy who shape shifts and travels across time and space. The scenes are filmed through the eyes of a child, superimposing different shots to form blurry images trying to come together to form memories.

There is a second series of wall works titled Passings (2019), which were developed during the performance, Dust (2019) at Centre Pompidou, for which he produced unique textiles out of radiological scans of 300-year-old traditional Arabic dresses loaned from the Tiraz Foundation in Jordan, overlaid with clothing belonging to his young performers. These works include new details, such as writing by the artist which are visible in this presentation of the fabrics as stretched canvases.

Text by Amy Zion