Al-Ashirah
The Clocks Are Striking Thirteen, Athr Gallery, Jeddah, 2018
Curated by Maya Elkhalil
Mixed-media exhibition with 298 polymer clay sculptures, animated film, sound and ink on cotton fabric.
Al-Ashirah is the story of a tribe that could tell no stories. Drawn from the Arabic ashrah, meaning ten, ashirah names a group of ten or more who hold the same story. Ten believers, in this telling, are enough to make a tribe.
The exhibition opens on a thought experiment. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar proposed that the human mind can hold intimate, personal bonds with roughly 150 others. Beyond that limit we move into tribal storytelling: we no longer recognise the individuals around us, only the narratives that draw us together or set us apart. Those narratives harden into our laws, our systems and our values.
In the future Shono imagines, narrative is reclassified as a disease of the mind. Truth is overrun by lies dressed as fact, and civilisations fail as the species fractures into smaller and smaller warring tribes. In a final attempt to save itself, one tribe is sent to inhabit a distant planet, each member encased before birth in a skin of technology designed to censor any story they might one day tell. Slowly the censor fails. One helmet is removed, then another, until the story has spread to every member of the marooned tribe. At the end, the head of the tribe, Al (آل), travels back through the stars carrying the story of his forgotten people home.
Al-Ashirah
Mixed-media installation with 200 polymer clay sculptures, video projection and musical composition.
The story moves from one member of the tribe to the next, told and retold, shared within a collective space until it has been heard by all. A common pool flips from white to black and back to white as new stories enter the room: a cycle of truths and lies, facts and fictions, doctrines accepted and then rejected to start anew.
The Heads of the Tribe
Polymer clay sculpture, fabric or paper with thread stitching, 2018.
A series of portraits of the tribe's heads, each held within a stitched skin of fabric or paper: a record of the bodies that carried the censored story, and of the helmets that fell away once it could no longer be contained.
The Book of Ãl
Ink illustrations on stitched and stained hemp fabric, with polymer clay sculptures, 550 × 140 cm, 2018.
The story carried home by Al unfolds across a long hemp scroll, drawn in ink, the surface stitched and stained as if it had survived its own long voyage through the stars.
