SSAF Installation Art Grant 2022 Lecture

12 April 2022, Online

Reem Fadda’s lecture focused on the second edition of Desert X which opened on 11 February 2022 in the rural desert and protected landscape of AlUla to the north of Saudi Arabia. The exhibition, under Reem’s curatorial vision, invited site-specific installations and art interventions in response to and collaboration with the ecology of the region from fifteen artists around the world. Reem spoke about organizing the exhibition under the concept of sarab, the Arabic word for mirage, and its resonances with an art that is “living”– in kinship with the natural systems that sustain life on this planet. The dichotomy of the oases that abound in AlUla and the fabled desert phenomenon of the mirage forms an allegory for the unattainability and the realization of desire, provoking interrogations of modern civilization’s legacy of conquest and greed. Reem conceptualized the exhibition as a mode of acknowledging the larger phenomenological assemblages of the human and non-human in making and thinking with art. In moving away from the sterility of the white cube towards an environment with minimal artificial intervention, the works in Desert X AlUla do not overpower or subsume the environment within which they are sited. Instead, the desert – at once gentle and severe – is entangled with the artists’ productions, dismantling the post-industrial, alienating notion of the ‘visitor’s’ ‘encounter’ with a discrete ‘art object’. As such, Reem’s lecture illuminated her speculative propositions for an art that is public, that responds to the urgency of emphasizing community in increasingly individualizing times.