Elsewhere

Shaqayeq Arabi

Elsewhere

“When I look back, the Garden is a dream to me. It was surpassingly beautiful, and now it is lost, and I shall not see it anymore.” —The Diaries of Adam and Eve, Mark Twain

Imagine the sensation of place. Not of a vibrant visual assault of colours and shapes, but of a feeling. An impression that tugs on your heart strings. An impression that is hinted at in its very absence. Felt in its loss. Heard in the soft rustle of foliage unseen. The gentle caress of a breeze on your cheek and sounds half-heard somewhere on the edges of your mind. “Elsewhere” will connect sky to ground through a sensory installation that engages with the intangible space between the real and unreal, waking and dream, that which exists and that which has been lost forever.

Working in found material, Arabi’s assemblages are often composed of simple materials, fundamentally abstract, yet evoking a range of associations. They speak to both the built, urban environment and the natural world by combining the textures of found objects with the rawness of materials such as wood, tree branches, dried flowers or pieces found in construction sites. By combining found natural and industrial objects from everyday life, her work examines the different forms and textures of materials, and, through them, the balance between the expressively abstract and the suggestively pictorial. They propose a metamorphosis from the base, synthetic nature of their materials to the ethereal nature of a composition—be it an installation or a sculpture.

In “Elsewhere,” Arabi proposes the notion of a space that is felt before it is seen; intuited before it is experienced. She works with material, light and shadow to create the sensation that every surface and every part of the room’s volume is inhabited by feelings. Building on previous series, her site-specific works fill every crevice with their being, both tangibly and intangibly.

Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017
Shaqayeq Arabi, From “Elsewhere” Series, Installation View (Detail), 2017