Marwah AlMugait: Process and Practice
Tracing motion while exploring the lens
Marwah AlMugait, Between Illusion and reality...is where I stand, from the series Mood Diary (2012) Digital photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
With text by Veeranganakumari Solanki, curator and writer.
Marwah AlMugait and I met at the Delfina Foundation in London, over the summer of 2019, when our residencies overlapped. AlMugait was there for a one-month residency, and I was half-way through my six-month term as the International Brooks Fellow at Tate Modern in the curatorial and photography department. While days were spent on the ground, working and researching for our individual practice, the evenings and weekends were usually at the Delfina Foundation, our home in London that nurtured family ties and conversations between the team and fellow residents. It was during these times, that we found ourselves immersed in conversations on our merging research of the expanding nature of photography through practice and text. The way AlMugait has explored the lens alongside photography, video and performance has been almost revolutionary.
Veeranganakumari Solanki (VS): As an independent artist, practising in Riyadh, how did a Masters in Photojournalism (2012) expand your practice of exploring the medium and rawness of photography with your subject matter.
Marwah AlMugait (MA): It was a quantum leap, and a turning point for me to have more substance for the image itself, compared to my earlier experience with commercial photography. My perceptions of the media of photography changed as research and awareness became the core of my work with a consciousness and responsibility of my subject and our surrounding environments. Documentary photography is a very long and intimate process that involves building relationships and a mutual authority of the voice. It taught me the importance of revisiting and responsibility.
VS: This is the time you made Mood Diary (2012), the work that won you an award during your Master's programme.
MA: I wanted to move beyond border-defined dialogues, into a narrative we all identify with, in personal spaces, but never speak about as global citizens. Mood Diary broadly relates to the increase in mental health patients, with a focus on bipolar disorders through the narrative of Mona, who braved sharing her personal space with me for this project. Empty spaces recur here and in my other works, leaving subliminal messages for the viewer to interpret as nostalgia, intimacy or as personal narratives. Encountering the ‘topic’ for the first time, I struggled with translating the topic into the visual, with the imagery holding more than just identity. It drew me to move beyond comfort and into the representation of the unseen and making the familiar unfamiliar.
VS: Temporality, performance, residues of live- theatre are crucial when experiencing your work.
MA: After a pause in my work in 2014, I started experimenting with ways to explore myself and the camera with the limited resources available then for my solo show, Sigh (2015). Oudah (2015), is an attempt to visualise a healing process that is layered with an invisible emotional journey, childhood memories and unanswered questions. Dance and theatre, to which I have been attracted for years, found their way into my work as expressions and body language, rather than spoken words. The lens, for me, is a tool to trace motion in ways that make the viewer inseparable from the camera. I work with the idea of pushing the angle and eye of the lens, even today, where it is performance that best captures the essence of the crucial emotional intimacy.
VS: This brings me to the idea of merging disciplines and media in your work, that undo expected ways of thinking.
MA: It is so important to have the freedom to experiment without limiting your artistic language to a singular medium. This allows one to push all other boundaries without hesitation. With the idea of space, there is the notion of symbology, where I am trying to provide, rather than provoke.
VS: You also performed twice in 2017—once alone during a residency in New York, the second time with a group of performers for We Were. This has in a way given you the sense of freedom to know what to expect and feel with your performers. It is an awareness of space and emotion that translates into the experience for the viewer as well.
MA: Photography and the camera is a pure medium that becomes the eye of the viewer. I needed to feel this collectiveness and energy-field with my performers, which I could only do by pushing boundaries and putting myself in new territories. It was an intense but required moment of being in front of the camera myself in We Were. The stories of arrival and departure from members of this performance make their way to me even today.
Marwah AlMugait, I Lived Once (2020) Video installation; Video stills. Courtesy of the artist.
VS: This act of arrival and departure resonates with Albunt (2019). Could you talk about this work that appears remarkably different from the rest of your practice and how it connects with your most recent video installation I Lived Once (2020).
MA: Both these works were commissioned by the Saudi Arts Council. Albunt, my first public art and 3D mapping project, I wanted to highlight the history and structure of the Ottoman Empire that carried with it stories of the sea and Haj pilgrims. The idea of collectivity and performance could be looked at as a link between the two works. 3D mapping is performative in terms of layering stories and progressing narratives. In, I Lived Once, a work that responds to biomimicry, the tree becomes the lens for the viewer, and eventually, the viewer through the camera becomes the attacker. The response of performers instantly becomes a psychological and emotional collective to manifest connections with nature.
VS: You are a perfectionist by nature, and while you do allow for ‘immaculate risk,’ you also like to be in complete control of the result. Now that you feel you have exhausted every possible way of exploring the lens, what is next?
MA: Maybe back to a single angle video, as a reflex that goes back to the stillness of my constructed frame as a photographer.
Solanki, Veeranganakumari (2020,). Marwah AlMugait: Process and Practice. Tribe, 10, 58-61.