PAST EXHIBITIONS
OUT OF THE Middle, November 20th, 2008
Coleman road is pleased to present Out of the Middle, a group exhibition featuring work by Souhail Al Zaatari, Abdallah Ko and Jonathan Nash.
In his piece Others, 2005, Souhail Al Zaatari presents five portraits of palestinian men. Al Zaatari examines how the tropes of patriotism can also assume sinister qualities, while recognizing the pitfalls surrounding collective identity.
In his piece Others, 2005, Souhail Al Zaatari presents five portraits of palestinian men. Al Zaatari examines how the tropes of patriotism can also assume sinister qualities, while recognizing the pitfalls surrounding collective identity.
‘I as a Middle Eastern person living in the west am somewhat effected by assumptions and characterizations of my culture and back round. And since the terrorist attacks on New York, London and Madrid, being a Muslim or an Arab you are somehow perceived to be a threat, suspicious or untrustworthy.’
Souhail’s amalgamation of fear and identity uses the Keffiyeh (scarf) as a contested symbol but also as a metaphor for a prejudice that moves to conceal individual identity. Although Souhail recognizes that periods of social mistrust shift with current events, the building blocks of collective identity remain hard to move. This is exemplified in the words of Colin Powell during his 2008 presidential endorsement of Barak Obama on Meet the Press.
‘I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.’ [Colin Powell on Meet the Press, October, 19, 2008 ]
Abdallah Ko is a Lebanese artist, based in Beirut. He uses blood, fire and ink to mark the paper. Fayez, 1994 shows an old friend ‘he hasn’t seen in a long time’.
In new works by Jon Nash titled Souvenirs the artist presents a series of large format photographs of objects and documents amassed through mixture of tourism and cultural archeology. The items were collected during trips to Syria and Lebanon between July and September 2008. Nash then drove these items from Beirut to London. This action resembles the collection of familiar and foreign objects by contemporary tourists as-well as those of historians and explorers since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late 18th century.
Antiquities from this time are still exhibited forming a large part of how ‘other’ cultures are understood. Currently at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris the show Bonaparte et L’Egypte, asserts that their set of objects show how Egypt “really was”.
While sometimes banal Nash's images exist within a larger dynamic, Often showing the appropriation of popular culture or the influence of global trade.
It is our intention to place the artists work before their origin, avoiding the reductive qualities of cultural stereotypes.