Unfolding the Embassy
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16 May - 01 September 2024
Opening on Wednesday, 15 May at 05:00 PM
Fenaa Alawwal
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Artists: Dima Srouji, Abbas Zahedi, Aseel Alyaqoub, Aseel Alyaqoub, Ahmad Hammoud, Ahmad Hammoud, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Jerry Galle, Phi Studio, Lana Cmajcanin, Ahaad Alamoud, Federico Acciardi, Peter Bogaczewicz, Naif Alquba, Dia Mrad
Curated by Sara Almutlaq
Unfolding the Embassy Do we need the distance of light years, to better see the near? 'Unfolding the Embassy' presents a fictitious timespace, a rediscovery of the human condition in the very present of 2024, through the perceptual distance of the dauntingly near future. The date is 2040, and we are situated in a Space-X satellite orbiting around a meta-earth, decomposed of its state borders due to environmental failure, and regulated by cyborgs wary of human intervention.
Instigated by the year of the pandemic, the complex system of global harmony is fracturing, the earth beneath them unravelling, swallowing up that which is unable to withstand. In 2024, the year of this exhibition, humanity is looking to its ultra-(un)real future with sentiments laced in both frustration from the past and a frightened exhilaration for the future. In an environment burgeoning with deep fakes, shifting structures, and the world discussing the future of AI and ChatGPT, Fenaa Alawwal’s exhibition titled 'Unfolding the Embassy' uses the Embassy structure as a vessel through which these ruptures are considered.
'Unfolding the Embassy' brings together works of installation, video, photography, and print media that address the state of our globe in relation to the economy, the Anthropocene, and artificial intelligence. In exploring the works of art and their conversations with one another, exhibition visitors are invited to speculate on the role of fiction in constructing the systems that hold our societies together. Here, decontextualized geographic borders, language symbols, and national emblems trigger audiences to reconsider that which they hold as truth and factual.
By arriving at the depth of our fictions, do we find a landscape of the arbitrary?