Clementine Butler-Gallie

WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING

Works by Hiba al-Ansari and Fadi al-Hamwi
The exhibition has been shown in both London and Kuwait.

Vardaxoglou, London, July 2017
Contemporary Art Platform, Kuwait, November 2019 (supported by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen)

KUWAIT

Exhibition Catalogue PDF
Exhibition Video

LONDON

Exhibition text:

While You Were Sleeping is the first joint presentation of Fadi al-Hamwi and Hiba al-Ansari, a view into the conceptual and material dialogue between their practices. The artists studied together at the Damascus Academy of Fine Arts and have maintained a close relationship since then. Al-Ansari and al-Hamwi concern themselves with lending physical shape to the human experience of war, but the human figure remains obscured in their multi-media practices. Instead, domestic furnishings, a cow carcass or toy soldiers offer traces of the lack of humanity in the everyday experience of conflict. A dialogue emerges between the artists’ common motif and material, revealing a parallel and deeply personal process of reckoning. Re-imagined domestic furnishings – a cement carpet, a map etched into a duvet – occupy the space, conjuring mirages of rooms left behind.

Pairs of blank eyes – the cow’s charcoal orifices in al-Hamwi’s Spoils, the featureless face of the figurine in his Artificial Sugar, the beaded clusters in al-Ansari’s Untitled mask series – seem to negate their own gaze. While You Were Sleeping suggests the viewer bear witness instead.

The artists direct their attention to the domestic spaces they left behind as a mode of processing and communicating war as an everyday reality. Familiar furnishings are re-imagined, altered to expose the experiences they carry. In Irrational loop of dust, al-Hamwi recreates his family’s carpet in concrete, replicating its ornate pattern and rubbing out its places of wear. Al-Hamwi draws upon traditional carpet craft and fresco techniques, repurposing the cement that surrounds the Damascus city-dweller as building and as rubble. Al-Ansari also teases out the potential in familiar material, using beads and a typical Bedouin bed sheet in her Untitled series. This series of obscured faces – at once menacing and alluring – plays with the material expectations and possibilities of portraiture. These charged domestic pieces evoke an infiltrated private sphere, where reimagining as art object reclaims space for private reckoning.

The recurrent figure of the bed becomes a particularly salient mode of expressing a political rendered personal, as war transgresses every threshold. In al-Hamwi’s Over My Bed (photograph, 2012), toy soldiers stand in formation, casting long shadows across bed sheets. When a military checkpoint was erected between al-Hamwi’s apartment and studio, he began purchasing a plastic soldier at a street market each time he crossed. After inadvertently collecting hundreds of soldiers, he purchased a man in civilian clothing and staged this scene over his own bed. Al-Hamwi re-stages Over My Bed for While You Were Sleeping, strewing melted figurines across the mattress. Melted green plastic oozes to black as the figurines glom together, distorting features and military garb. The civilian appears again in Artificial Sugar, as an army of ants topple their sugar-coated leader.

In al-Ansari’s Decke, the bed becomes a map, as the artist carefully embroiders the cross-hatched streets of her native Rahkka onto the in white thread. Referring to aerial shots of the destruction of her city, al-Ansari tears the duvet, pulling out puffs of sheep’s wool that mimic and mark cites of explosion. While You Were Sleeping gestures towards the way material holds memory. Rendering traces of personal experience tangible, Al-Hamwi and al-Ansari coax a process of reckoning into striking, palpable form.

Selected Press: