Alaa Edris: Unreal. Unseen. Untouched.
Probing the ethereal in cultural narratives
Alaa Edris, Devourless 04 (2008) Digital C print (series of 4), 40 x 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Woodman Taylor, art historian and ethnomusicologist.
Ever since encountering Alaa Edris in her multiple transformations into Seven Jinnat of the Trucial States (2011), the artist’s ability to navigate between realities interwoven with mythologies and other cultural narratives became visually visceral in her practice. How can an artist envision herself as a creative composite, manipulating her own face to morph with an owl’s, thereby referencing an Emirati folktale about a woman becoming a jinn-owl upon death of her son, after which she haunts neighborhoods with flybys searching for him? It is her ability to transcend and manipulate realities that gives Edris’s projects an uncanny presence of the unseen, the possibilities of envisioning a manipulated future while also excavating foundational beliefs in Emirati society.
Unreal. Unseen. Untouched. Alaa Edris’ first solo exhibition, at 1X1 Gallery in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, included a range of her projects from the 14 years since graduating in Fine Arts from the university of Sharjah. The exhibition includes her work in photography, video and installation. If to start at her beginnings, you will need to visit the washroom. In her installation The Great Puzzle washroom users see an image of Edris reciting from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as soon as they close their stall, on a mirror LCD mounted on the door. This is the most recent iteration of her very first art act while in arts school, where she took mirrors with pasted text from Alice’s Adventures, Placing them in both the men and women’s washroom stalls. In this, Idris was already challenging boundaries, taking her own image and voice to where it was not meant to be present nor seen.
In her two-channel video The Consumer-The Consumed (2014) Edris critiques the act of consumption, with images of her cutting up dried bread mirrored with a video showing her painfully eating pieces of bread until on the verge of tears. For the 14th Sharjah Biennial (2019) Edris created Black Boxes of Observational Activities where, though a small hole viewers, as would be voyeurs, witness mundane activities taking place within Sharjah’s old city.
Current urban constructions as well as possible future metropolitan configuration are the subject of Edris’s two large photographic projects. In Reem Dream X Edris snuck into the subterranean foundations of new projects being built on Reem Island in Abu Dhabi. Her black and white photographs reveal the not-so-beautiful and ever more revealing mooring on which the dreamlike structures above are being built.
The most monumental work in the exhibition, The Face, takes Edris’s presence into three dimensions. Using projections upon a huge wall mounted sculpture of the front part of her face, Edris comes alive, with her eyes gazing out and moving around the gallery. Moving between real and unreal, seen and unseen worlds, Edris’ work inhabits the ethereal, touching us by not touching.