Time, Coincidence and History, in the main, is a space for crystallizing the vestiges of colonial and postcolonial history covering in its broad sweep the legacies of social-political conflicts, religious parochialism that places identity over piety, and, finally, the body as a carrier of the pathologies of time. This intermedia art exhibition places in an imposing aesthetic order references to all of the above and more in an orchestrated display of sculptures (including kinetic pieces), moving images, drawings, and dried twigs and branches presented in a bountiful display and leaves and sprouts preserved inside small transparent resin blocks.
In many a large sculpted object artist Dhali Al Mamoon mediates the body as material, or material as indication of the body whose structure in its recognizable contour has been willfully made to disappear. If Francis Bacon ‘dismantled the face’, to use Gilles Deleuze’s phrase,* Mamoon disavows the corporeal body or the structure in order to appropriate the vertebra and tresses of hair as his central tropes – resizing and restructuring the former and incorporating the latter as an antidotal object mining their soft, melancholic constructions. To forward a conglomerate of references to the civilizational malaise, which Mamoon addresses with an apparent emphasis on the anthropocene, one witnesses…
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