Guided Exhibition Tour
Gulf Photo Plus takes the public through a guided tour of Tanya Habjouqa's solo show, The Sacred Space Oddity, and through to Ishara Art Foundation’s group show Growing Like A Tree, locating the common grounds between them, and engaging the public in a critical dialogue that transcends the exhibtions’ specific enthographies, into a wider consideration of image-making and artistic process.
Introductions by GPP for The Sacred Space Oddity will be followed by a guided exploration with Sabih Ahmed of Ishara Art Foundation. Attendees will take a closer look at both exhibition spaces, and read them in dialogue with one another. This is a unique opportunity for a joint photographic exhibitions tour, where the attendees can draw unexpected connections between 15 expansive transnational bodies of work in a critical capacity, and experience their photographic practices in new and imaginative ways.
This event is free and by registration only on a first-come first-served basis.
About The Sacred Space Oddity
Tanya Habjouqa’s The Sacred Space Oddity is an elegiac meditation on the interaction of the physical and psychological space encompassed in the loaded, often effacing, phrase “Holy Land”. Habjouqa’s rigorous practice is rooted in her many journeys across the landscape over the last ten years as a photojournalist, and in her extensive interrogation of Israel-Palestine’s more esoteric visual cultures and in the general aesthetics of a political and military occupation. The immersive audio-visuals and vested character studies in The Sacred Space Oddity offer a multitude of ways to learn and unlearn the material and psychic space that defines the so-called ‘Holy Land’. Aided by a skepticism of static, monolithic media representations of the conflict, it leads with the threads of new narratives and visual departures as embodied by the affected communities. In it’s current iteration, this body of work peers closely into the intimate dispositions of their inhabitants, and what unfettered interpersonal dynamics form among its indigenous Palestinians and settler populations, drawing necessary observations and sub- references from a highly militarized and hyper-normalized urban setting.
About Growing Like A Tree
Growing Like A Tree marks Sohrab Hura’s inaugural curatorial project as a photographer and filmmaker, along with the presentation of several artists and collectives never before shown institutionally in a regional and international context. Hura’s individual and collective journeys through photography and moving image over the years have presented both a form of rooting and uprooting of places as markers of identity. Through this exhibition, he maps a network of past and present collaborators with 14 artists and collectives from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Germany, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Singapore, seeking to expand the framework of boundaries set out by the geographical context of South Asia. Together they create a space where multiple voices and experiences are brought into dialogue with one another. The artists represented in this exhibition tackle themes of changing cities, collective memory, the environment, public spaces and the archive through works that sit at the intersection of documentary and fiction, image and object. Referencing the interconnected spheres of contemporary artistic practice, this show considers photography as a locus in an expanded field of art that includes videos, books and sound installations.