The Caliph Seeks Asylum
Galleria d'Arte Moderna Torino, Italy, 2019
Commissioned by GAM Torino, realised in collaboration with Athr Gallery
Site-specific installation with 3,500 recyclable PVC pipes
The Caliph Seeks Asylum is a pair of tent-like structures built from roughly 3,500 PVC pipes and pitched as a makeshift camp outside any fixed time or place. One tent is for a Caliph whose ideology has been rejected and sent into exile. The other is for a refugee displaced by the devastation that ideology produced. Both are stranded in a foreign land, left to negotiate a way back to a peaceful home.
The work belongs to Shono's ongoing revision of the Arab psyche, a quiet refusal of the lesson he was taught in the classroom: that self-esteem is tied to victory on the battlefield. The camp suspends that lesson in time. It becomes a node on the historical timeline, a meeting point for those who would adopt and those who would reject the same inheritance, and a place where fighters chasing the myth of lost glories and the populations their conflicts displaced might sit together and imagine a different way forward.
Shono proposes a return to glory of a different order, that of the Golden Age of Baghdad, reached not through the resurrection of caliphates but through the rebuilding of Arab Houses of Wisdom.
With thanks to Leading Law Notai e Avvocati, Turin.
