‘I’m Questioning How Much I Believe in It:’ Artist Wael Shawky on His Fantastical Remapping of Arab History

Maps are the age-old tool that
help us humans orient ourselves, allowing us to conceptualize the
world’s terrain and land masses all the way down to our own
neighborhood blocks. And, as our everyday reliance on GPS today
would indicate, people trust maps. 

But for Alexandria-born artist
Wael Shawky, maps are better thought of as imaginary spaces—where
mountains are flattened, lands are stretched and shrunk, rushing
waterways marked as steady lines. All historical documents are, in
his view, a mode of storytelling, and the narrators are not always
so reliable. 

In “The Gulf Project Camp,”
Shawky’s debut exhibition at Lisson Gallery in New York, and his
first show in the city since MoMA PS1’s  “Cabaret
Crusades” in 2015, the artist is immersing visitors in a theatrical
sculptural environment that melds together antiquated European maps
of the Middle East, Shawky’s own drawings, and scenes and figures
from the history and lore of the Arabian
Peninsula. 

A mountain-like crenelated,
turquoise wall installation dominates the gallery, which also
serves as a  stage for a few of the artist’s new bronze
sculptures—themselves whimsical amalgamations of animals and
terrains of the region. Elsewhere are intricate wood relief
carvings dated between 400 and 2000 years old, ice-like cast glass
sculptures produced in Venice, and, in a smaller back room, several
dozen of Shawky’s new ink and oil drawings 

Throughout the exhibition,
Shawky playfully thumbs at the boundaries between history and
storytelling. This ethos is captured nicely in a
wood-carving entitled
The Gulf Project Camp: Carved
wood (after ‘Hajj (Panoramic Overview of Mecca)’ by Andreas Magnus
Hunglinger, 1803. The
work depicts a 17th-century map of Mecca drawn by a European
cartographer—an incongruous continental European mountain range
fills the background. To his own version Shawky has added a
creature that’s part camel, part rock formation, which sits
monumentally in the background, unpinning any lingering
associations with a factual reality. 

Curious and playful absurdities
abound. Shawky has been researching and developing many of the
ideas explored in the show for a forthcoming new film series
titled The Gulf
Project, which will
focus on the Arab Peninsula from the 17th century to the present
day, and the transformation of the urbanism and ruling families in
Gulf societies. Perhaps the films will draw history in harder
lines, but here at least it is presented as a plaything, acting out
in costumes and colors, or like an illustrated storybook that’s
waiting for its newest retelling

 

To see the exhibition and hear
Shawky’s commentary, click the video below. 

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“Wael Shawky: The Gulf Project Camp” is on view at Lisson
Gallery through October 16, 2019.

The post ‘I’m Questioning How Much I Believe in It:’ Artist
Wael Shawky on His Fantastical Remapping of Arab History
appeared first on artnet News.