RIYADH: As the sun sets over Riyadh, night becomes the star of the show in the Saudi Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest exhibition “At Night.”
The show is an ode to the secrets, possibilities and complex dimensions of darkness and contemporary artistic practices surrounding different stages of the night.
Curated by Geraldine Bloch, it features more than 30 artists from around the world including France, Morocco, Tunisia, India, Japan, Argentina, Pakistan, Croatia, Australia and the United Kingdom, all united by the complexities of their practices and shared connections. Night scene.
Hans op de Beeck's work is entitled “My bed is a raft, and the room is a sea. Then I laughed with some gloom within me.” (supplied)
The painting “Shafts of Light” by Polish artist Katarzyna Physiolek is inspired by the magnificence of the universe. She hand-paints the pieces using some of the darkest pigments she can find. After stripping the paper of its first layer to create an absorbent surface for the morse, you apply the powder to the fabric.
The work is characterized by flashes of light that descend into pitch black, transporting viewers into a liminal space dominated by stars and sky.
highLights
• “At Night” curated by Geraldine Bloch features more than 30 artists from around the world including France, Morocco, Tunisia, India and Japan.
• The song by Saudi artist Hanaa Al-Milli, “I told my dreams to come, and they came,” was also shown.
Veciolek is drawn to the multidimensionality of darkness: “Night for me is a kind of rest. The comfort you feel when you're alone is a comfort zone for me, but it can also be kind of scary. The night is also very silent, so you can hear sounds or see much more light than during the day.
The artist draws from scientific imagery and personal memories, and the three works on view evoke a strong sense of suspense and sadness.
Artist Nadezza Nikolova moved to painting landscapes after photographing them for a long time. Like Wiesiolek, she relies on memory to leave imprints on the scene. Her “Primal Forms” use paper masks, brushes and various manipulations via the early photographic collodion process to transform images of an ambiguous nature.
Claudia Tennant is a South African artist. (picture)
“The night is never without a source of light,” she said, “and within it there is a sense of security that we can trust — that we are not alone.”
“It is a time of dreams and visions, a time when you can open your aperture and look out into the universe and connect to this sense of the greater reality and we are a part of it.”
Textiles often hold memories. They carry your history
Claudia TennantSouth African artist
She celebrates her intimate connection with nature by using it as a source of inspiration. “Nature has such purity and it is much easier to connect with this source than, say, an urban space,” she explained.
The work is less about copying or documenting and more about becoming an “embodied camera” of sensory information. After spending some time in a particular place, absorbing all its majestic details, she works quickly to produce pieces in layers of exposure.
“Song of Silence” by Muhannad Shono draws inspiration from ancient novels and legends. (supplied)
“Wet collodion dries in three minutes, and once it dries I can’t use it,” Nikolova said. “You have to rely on instinct, and that comes from a lot of repetition and just your intuition.”
She sometimes has to strip away some details to create a more universal experience within her work – in a way, art lies fundamentally in the process itself and its adaptation.
South African illustrator Claudia Tennant also creates textile art. In the exhibition, she is displaying her artwork “I'm Sorry”, which is a multi-material tapestry in which colors and threads accumulate, twist, swell and expand as living things do.
The painting “Shafts of Light” by Polish artist Katarzyna Wiziolek was inspired by the magnificence of the universe. (picture)
“There's an idea about going through something: those less painful emotions like fear and guilt emerge, and you go through that and come out the other side,” she told Arab News. “Textiles often hold memories. They hold your history.”
The piece looks organic and the woven fabric becomes a mesh. The massive piece comes loose in some places and intertwines tightly in others. It is characterized by multiple fabrics and colors, including construction bags that emerge from the knitting, indicating the duality of roughness and softness in humans.
The piece, completed during the overnight hours, almost comes together as a celebration of everything encompassing Tennant's victories and defeats.
Vladimir Skoda's “From the Inside” puts 21 spheres in an oval into the question of the invisible and inaccessible heart of matter. It challenges the viewer to perceive beyond dead matter. (supplied)
French-Moroccan artist Mustapha Azroual uses a monochromatic photographic process called dichromate gum, which dates back to the 1850s. Azroual walked for five days in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains and patiently captured the landscape from different angles, eventually leading to his series “Elios,” which means “sun” in Greek.
“Light makes things visible, but they are invisible,” he told Arab News. It gives us the ability to see. The feeling you get through artwork is more than just visual.
Using the inverted image of the sun hitting the scope, it creates an artificial night scene and focuses on the light we can't see.
“At Night” displays immersive installations including “Replacing a Missing Tooth” by Saudi artist Abeer Sultan. (supplied)
“What I want to show is not the mountain, but the light that projects it,” he said. The film negative is the first recording of light ever made, he said.
“At Night” is the culmination of cosmic nights, energy, abundant evenings and dreams. Each artwork is a star outlining the gallery's constellation.
It showcases poetic creations such as Saudi Arabia’s Hana Al-Milli’s “I told my dreams to come, and they came,” and Arwa Al-Naimi’s “The Voice of Cardamom,” as well as immersive installations including Abeer Sultan’s “Algebra of a Missing Tooth” and Mohamed Al-Faraj’s “Did You Hear That?”
The exhibition continues until the end of May 2024.
