ASMA BELHAMAR

Titled When the Window Refused to Fly, and the Arch Decided to Hold the Sky, the exhibition presents a whimsical spatial proposal, inviting the viewer to regard the courtyard of the Emirati house as a type of playground—a place of belonging and memory, as well as a space for imagination and play. It is based around the memory of a second, unfinished courtyard in Belhamar’s family home, where, while the adults remained undecided on how to use the plot or simply waited for the family to expand, the children played with discarded building materials and turned the empty space into a stage. The artist invites the viewer to join her in this childhood game: walk around, sit, stand, sneak, slide, or simply imagine. Take a peek at the elements at hand before closing your eyes and allowing your ideas to take flight.

Belhamar fuses fragments of local examples of ornamentation, which she documents on her evening walks, with existing generic forms extracted from both the urban environment (such as walls, curbs, and playground slides) and the domestic environment (for example, stairwells and seating). Her focus remains fixed firmly on architecture in its physical and psychological forms. The drawings presented are extensions of Belhamar’s ongoing exploration into how architecture in the United Arab Emirates is experienced, as though viewed from a moving vehicle. Like the balustrades that she has come to be known for, which appear to stretch or melt, her drawings play with the idea of double-takes, whether due to the optical effect of speed or the distorted residue of a memory. Reminiscent of glitching cameras, dreamy flashbacks, or the drive-by glimpse of a scene, the drawings hone in on corners, freezing the movement of shadows or capturing the layered grid structures of the city. Created on primed canvas using acrylic, the drawings feature a color palette that echoes the sun-soaked walls of government-granted plots demarcated by UAE citizens under land grant schemes, as well as the sepia tones of old family albums. The drawings also replicate the physical delineations they capture, forming walls within walls, which serve to enclose the gallery space, effectively turning it into a courtyard.

For this exhibition, Belhamar used a technique that merges the affordances of technological advancement with the handmade. The ceramic elements within her spatial assemblies are 3D printed. Far from the smooth, hassle-free process one may imagine, this is an intensive approach to making. The artist must first create an inner architecture for structural integrity, for which she appropriates ornamental forms, before processes of wedging, printing, attaching, drying, firing, glazing, and re-firing can take place. These pieces are then married with other forms in wood, the result of which represents neither architecture nor furniture. While the pieces take inspiration from existing elements, they are skewed in scale. Some pieces are placed on unused tiles from the artist’s home, while others are carefully nestled within supportive frames, encouraging the viewer to contort to their own logic.

In The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston Bachelard sets out to prove that “imagination augments the values of reality,” suggesting that it is the memories of all the houses we have lived in, or dreamed that we have lived in, that culminate in our concept of what we call a home. This is how a space becomes a place: the psycho-social, the analytical, and the phenomenological operate simultaneously. Simply put, it is something beyond the physical edifice that makes a house a place of dwelling. It is the result not of the form, material, nor size of a dwelling, nor its location, smell, or the memories contained within it, but rather an accumulation of the physical and the psychological. In his 1971 text “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Heidegger states, “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell.” Belhamar’s artistic proposal is infused throughout the entire exhibition space and can be taken to function as a wider metaphor for the building practices of the UAE at large, as far as they can be interpreted on a domestic scale. It offers an invitation to ruminate on the nostalgia of the modern, the efficiency of the technological, as well as the creative challenge of the empty lot. If dwelling is a question of how to live, then it is indelibly tied to the question of how and what we build in order to live. Belhamar’s work proposes that dreams are constructed from both the future and the past.