The Artist’s Rooms is back with an inviting and delightful introduction to the perspective and practice of three emerging creatives.
Now in its sixth year, the works in the exhibition are mostly drawn from the Art Jameel collection, focusing on talents from Asia and Africa. This year, presented in the three ground-floor galleries at Jameel Arts Centre, featured artists include Australia's Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Filipino multi-disciplinary artist Augustine Paredes and British-Indian artist Amba Sayal-Bennett.
In Simpson's installation, Vessel (iteration #5), three sand islands are spread across the first gallery space, each with several black clay vessels buried and emerging out of the sand. A descendant of labourers who were sent from India to work on colonial sugar plantations in South Africa, the clay pots are a reference to Simpson's own family’s history.
Her pieces displayed in the gallery are an attempt to understand the exploitation of those labourers and the history of diaspora communities. Across the installation are a series of stunning illustrations, also by Simpson. Intricately painted with watercolour and gouache on handmade wasli paper, the pieces depict Indian women working the fields, resting, interacting, wandering alone or caring for babies.
Entitled Jahajin, which translates from the South African Bhojpuri term "ship-sister", the works acknowledge the history and experiences of women taken from India to South Africa as labourers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Their experiences are drawn in the style of miniature paintings, which traditionally have been used to archive the stories of the privileged. Here, Simpson uses the style to highlight the experiences of women whose stories weren’t documented or erased from history.
In gallery two, Paredes’s work is an ethereal exploration of his relationship to identity and family. In his work, Panaghoy, three long-weaved, collaged tapestry-like pieces float in the middle of the space. It’s hard to tell whether they are sewn, glued or woven into each other but burnt pieces, ink stains and wool threads are brought together like a quilt or a map, telling a narrative of Paredes’s reflections on identity, guilt, devotion and desire.
Another piece, Mother, is an intriguing photographic portrait of his mother Marife. The photograph is a profile shot where her face is focused outside of the frame. Half the image and half of her face are covered by a large electric blue block of colour. The work acts as a homage to her, adding another chapter to Parefes’s own self-exploration. Parefes’s work across the various mediums he applies feels romantic and restrained, but also open to interpretation.
Meanwhile, Sayal-Bennett’s clean sculptural installations are simple but striking in gallery three. Spanning eight years of her practice, the works are an exploration, both in 2D and 3D, of the social-political contexts of architectural heritage, modernist ideologies and colonialism. With stylistic references to sci-fi elements, they examine traces of migration in architectural forms across continents while informing Sayal-Bennett's own history.
For example, Chandigarh in Punjab is referenced. The birthplace of her maternal grandparents, the city was designed by famed Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture.
Through her precise sculptural works that mould themselves into the interior of the space, Sayal-Bennett takes these architectural concepts and examines how the concept of modernism fails within post-colonialist contexts.
Exploring themes about identity and history through various styles and aesthetic concerns, the Artist’s Rooms is a thoughtfully laid out exhibition giving each artist’s work breadth to feel contained but equally cohesive within the themes of the exhibition as a whole.
The Artist's Rooms at Jameel Arts Centre will be running until November 24
