Barakat Contemporary is pleased to announce the participation of Art Dubai 2023. At the Art Dubai 2023, Barakat Contemporary plans to introduce major works of four prominent artists—Yunchul Kim, Ali Cherri, Nevin Aladağ, and Shezad Dawood. First of all, we will come face to face with a scene in which Ali Cherri's assemblage sculptures, made from fragments of artefacts, are joined by Yunchul Kim's ever-so-slightly moving kinetic living sculpture. This scene will provide an experience comparable to that of standing at the centre of a history museum surrounded by artefacts, with the strange, bizarre senses of Yunchul Kim's new technology creature The Dust of Suns II (2022). The four artists and their works activate/stimulate the viewer's space and time, and bodily senses as they strike the space between turbulent movements and sound created within objects and materials.
Ali Cherri's two new sculptures, Vermilingua Bust (2023) and Seated Simia (2023) are made out of clay sand (mud) and Nigeria & Burkina Faso masks from the first half of 20th century. Cherri understands mud as the vessel and the water within. As deeply embedded in the narratives of creation, mud grounds life in a cycle that always finds its way back into the earth. A consistent theme in Cherri's practice is ways of bringing social change in the present by revisiting sites of present and past destruction through our imagination. Through his imagination, the ancient world and contemporary society merge as spaces of mythmaking.
Yunchul Kim's spiral waves, constructed from the material movements of constant rise and fall, are in motion endlessly. The Dust of Suns II (2022) visualises the creation and extinction of an infinitely expanding spiral that attracts all surrounding matters with a strong force. The title of the piece is inspired by the French novelist Raymond Roussel's play 'La Poussière de Soleils (The Dust of Suns).' The mineral, deep underground, transforms into nanoparticles through heat, chemical reactions, and sonic waves—ultimately becoming a mix of nature and the artificial. The work's performative material of lights and colours manifests through pressures and flows generated by various mechanical devices. It is a 'TransMatter' that creates physical and aesthetic events simultaneously. The fluid becomes the subject of the process and constantly circulates while sealed inside specially designed panels and tubes that are entangled, resembling blood vessels. Minerals, which had been in darkness for aeons of time, materialise into new realities every moment as particles and fluid of matterphoric matter. This 'reality' is related to our imagination and body as a symptom of matter and machinery.
Nevin Aladağ's Resonator String (2019) is not only an assemblage sculpture combining geometric shapes such as straight lines, diagonals, circles, triangles, and squares but also an instrument produced by the artist in collaboration with specialists in instrument-making. Resonator Strings (2019) was similarly produced with bass guitar, cello, and zither strings, an amplifier, and various pieces of machinery. With its production and amplification of sounds, the work becomes a physical setting for sharing the history of sound through instruments that combine objects created by diverse cultural spheres to produce sounds transcending space and time.
The two works in Nevin Aladağ's Social Fabric, round and round, and Social Fabric, high and low (2022), of which the viewer can catch a glimpse beyond the works of Cherri and Kim, serve as a portal into a different space, as well as a contemporary cultural map for 'cultural hybridity.' Aladağ's multidisciplinary works explore the social and political borders of urban spaces and cultures, displaying a special focus on the role of sound in constructing an environment. Aladağ's two Social Fabric works reference and combine traditional patterns from different cultural origins across geographical boundaries. Through a collage approach using different fabrics, the work experiments with transformation and the sense of 'belonging.' Among these different possibilities, Aladağ's body of work forms a sociocultural narrative that 'addresses peoples and cultures of diaspora, which is an important and in fact crucial aspect of a contemporary identity that thrives on diversity, that is placeless, and that has to be considered against the old notions of roots, origins, belonging.'
Shezad Dawood's painting Kamal (2022) is part of the public commission from Doha, Qatar, while he was probing into the legacy of the modern buildings within the city. The architecture featured in his painting was inspired by the building at Qatar University, designed by the architect Kamal el Kafrawi in 1973. This critical modern architecture represents the moment in history in which Qatar shifted to an independent nation. Shezad Dawood works across the disciplines of painting, film, neon, sculpture, performance, virtual reality, and other digital media to ask key questions of narrative, history, and embodiment. Using the editing process as a method to explore both meanings and forms, his practice often involves collaboration and knowledge exchange, mapping across multiple audiences and communities. Dawood interweaves stories, realities, and symbolism through a fascination with the esoteric, otherness, the environment, and architectures, both material and virtual, to create richly layered artworks.