Cuadro

In response to landscapes being altered, and architecture demolished to pave way for glossy newness, there is an rapidly fading sense of what “is.” Drawing on an almost exisistentialist faculty, artists attempt to shed light on the world as they know it – whether through factual documentation, simulated reality, or a forecast of the world to come – towards the preservation of now. Inherent in their work is a deeply temporal acknowledgement of the passing of time.

Sinisa Vlajkovic and Mohamed Somji’s “Substations” document independently owned diesel stations, a phenomenon unique to the emirates of Ajman and Ras Al Khaimah. Catering almost exclusively to the trucking community, they carry the personality of their owners in their humble, utilitarian construction. Customs such as knowing customers by name and offering them refreshments are foreign and inaccessible to citydwellers, making the “Substations” a sharp contrast to and reminder of the homogeneity and impersonal nature of modern stations. The series is reminiscent of Ed Ruscha’s seminal “Twenty Six Gasoline Stations” not only in its subject matter, but also its seriality and repetitive sequencing. Vlajkovic and Somji’s stations, however, are ephemeral, lasting only a few years given economic and legal challenges. They serve as haunting portraits of the condemned.

Vikram Divecha’s “Urban Epidermis” is a commentary on the present through the staging of a constructed reality. Divecha recreates the infrastructural underpinnings of every city, its streets, through a painstaking industrial process acquired through working closely with road construction factories. The artist then applies weathering on the works, evidencing the inevitable dilapidation and erosion inherent in these fundamental structures. Divecha’s layers of asphalt imply the overlay of strata over natural elements, which create an imposed boundary with nature. These worn layers convert the work into a living thing, a record of its past. The marks become semiotic constructs, evoking marks on a body.

Sami Al-Turki relies on the medium of photography to simultaneously capture and destroy the places we inhabit. In his “Washaeg” (Nexus) series, he revisits and transforms a place he knew well as a child - Obhur’s Red Sea coastline in Jeddah. Al-Turki goes beyond documentation, manipulating his photographs to present the viewer with a post-apocalyptic prediction of what is to come, were negligence of resources to persist. He relies on a generous amount of background looming with ominous skies to create a scene heavy with what appears to be a violence that has come and passed. The viewer is transported through the artist’s visual commentary on the need for change to a world that could be, in a prediction of urban impermanence.