The Other Sky

This metaphor, however, is associated less with social and political liberties and more with the scientific revolution and the history of aviation. Globalisation is always ‘on flight,’ steamrolling throughout the entire earth, on the wings of a plane, compressing distances and expanding human fields. Flight is a new dimension of the human conditions drawing alternative topographies of simultaneity, embedded in cosmopolitan histories.

Yet there’s another sky, at lower height, almost above our heads when we look up. In this other sky, under which millions live, behind many fences, cages, borders and transit points, physical and otherwise, flight is no longer the grand metaphor of freedom, but the haunting presence of an aspiration, of a dream of liberation. Embodied in artworks all of whose central theme is birds, artists from the broader Middle East question the reality of different skies which exist in plain view before our eyes, and from whose injustices it is no longer possible to turn away. Varying from each other in degrees of gravity, all the works in this exhibition draw a silhouette around the slow flight trajectory of human freedom towards a territory of possibility.

Celebrated modernist Hussein Madi presents his signature paintings and sculptures of birds in which traditional symbols first encountered the almost ecstatic magic of abstraction, pointing towards a different understanding of symbols whose meaning has changed over time. Jamal Abdul Rahim, one of Bahrain’s most celebrated sculptors presents his whimsical sculptures of birds using heavy materials such as bronze, marble, granite and lapis lazuli, deliberately giving a formal grammar to the difficulties of flight. More contemporary Arab artists, Manal AlDowayan and Abdulrahman Katanani, turn to the figure of the bird to speak, respectively, of the plight of women rights in Saudi Arabia and the living memory of the reality of Palestinian refugees stranded in camps in Lebanon.

Iranian artists converse with their Arab peers through similar strategies to parse the historical: The sound and video artist Azadeh Nilchiani presents a video work depicting the contemporary realities of migration and Yashar Samimi Mofakham is showcased with a multimedia work narrating the harsh realities of Iran today. The painter Behnaz Ghasemi, following her fascination with the skies, brings forth the presence of time and light in birds that almost chirp to the eye. The Other Sky is not a lamentation over impossible flight, but a temporal moment opening towards the necessity of art to participate in the political through its own process of extending the language of resistance and representation of conflict. Flight from darkness is not negation, but acknowledgement of the blurred lines of reality.

The flight of a bird, is in Islamic literature—a mystical tradition that both Arabs and Iranians share, a metaphor for the divine journey of the soul to God, and hence, a ubiquitous presence that escapes the boundaries between places; a fragile in between space where realities under conflict can be narrated, endowing the interrupted voices with a memory site. In The Other Sky, artists from a region in transition and turbulence denounce through manifold strategies, the invisibility of those that as Paul Celan noted, are ‘unsheltered even by the traditional tent of the sky.’

Arie Amaya-Akkermans