ART CITIES:Dubai-Shadi Habib Allah
In his practice, Shadi Habib Allah is interested opening up suggestive modes of navigation across circulation networks of people, technologies, objects, images and economy to examine ideas of use and value and the structures that hold them in place. Working across film, sculpture and drawing to installation, each project defines its own terms based on research and physical engagement.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Green Art Gallery Archive
Shadi Habib Allah’s video “Daga’a” (2015) is on presentation at the Green Art Gallery In Dubai. The work was commissioned y for the New Museum Triennial in 2015, since then has been shown at festivals around Europe, but this will be its first appearance in the Middle East. The film takes us on an unlikely journey across the heavily militarised Sinai Peninsula in Egypt with a group of Bedouins. In most countries in the Middle East the Bedouin have no land rights, only users’ privileges, and it is especially true for Egypt. Since the mid-80s, the Bedouin who held desirable coastal property have lost control of much of their land as it was sold by the Egyptian government to hotel operators. Egypt did not see it as the land that belongs to Bedouin tribes, but rather as a state property. After the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, the Sinai Bedouin were given an unofficial autonomy due to political instability inside the country. But Egyptian authorities traditionally view the Bedouin cross-border ties with Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia with suspicion. Due the unemployment the Bedouin tribes living along the border between Egypt and Israel are involved in inter-border smuggling. Shot by Habib Allah over many months, the video charts multiple trips in which the artist passed through one Bedouin network and into another, as if he himself were a smuggled good. From one perspective, his voyage can be seen as a straightforward business transaction, for the required sum, and with the proper access, he is smuggled from the southern Sinai desert deep into its more remote and neglected areas. From another vantage point, it presents the potent machinations of political invisibility, as the Bedouins leverage their ongoing legal marginalisation and deep familiarity with the desert to defy military surveillance and thrive, albeit illegally, by locating routes through a terrain that otherwise seems open and unmarked. In the work, the Bedouins are presented anonymously, with their faces blurred both to protect them and so as to not break the social contract of the journey. Habib Allah’s palpable lack of agency and personal mobility throughout the process, which is amplified by rapid cuts within the video meant to mirror the quick, tactical routes of the smuggling process, finds parallels in broader legal regulations on immigration that restrict movement on the basis of national conflicts.
Info: Green Art Gallery, Al Quoz 1, Street 8, Alserkal Avenue, Unit 28, Dubai, Duration: 15/1-7/2/17, Days & Hours: Sat-Thu 10:00-19:00, www.gagallery.com
