Streams, Dreams, and Flow States

Nafthah, Khuzam Palace, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2019
Curated by Moath Alofi

Site-specific installation with 3,000 black PVC pipes.

An old, abandoned building with exposed brick and concrete walls, featuring three arched windows with broken or missing panes. Long black cables are draped and piled along the floor and leaning against the walls, creating a flowing, wave-like pattern.

Streams, Dreams, and Flow States is a freehand sketch of a post-oil future, drawn in three dimensions: three thousand black PVC pipes traced through the interior of the long-abandoned Khuzam Palace in Jeddah, shaped in unscripted gestures that move toward unforeseen ends.

The material is chosen for what it is not. Cheap, uniform, abundant, the PVC pipe is a quiet byproduct of an industry whose raw substance, oil, wields immense political and economic weight. In Shono's hands the byproduct becomes the medium, and the dream is drawn from the discards of the present.

Site deepens the gesture. Khuzam Palace is where the first oil exploration agreement between Saudi Arabia and the United States was signed in 1933, the contract that set the country's modern course. To sketch through its rooms with the residue of that very industry is to lay a new line over an old one, and to ask what shape the next agreement might take.

IMG_8344_S.jpgMuhannad Shono_Streams dreams and flow states_2.jpg