Once, we fell from the sky and landed in Babel. 2015
CONCRETE BRICKS, SECONDHAND CARPET, SECONDHAND SHOES, COAL, FRANKINCENSE.
The Heart of Sharjah is comprised of transcontinental, religiously diverse, and multi-linguistic communities that are deeply rooted in superstitious beliefs, such as receiving divine sustenance through labor and expressing evident fear of envy of a competitive market. The intersection between commercial and spiritual practices ritualize labor by making symbolic connections with inherently worthless objects. Once an object claims importance through our perception, it then occupies a space which demands respect and reverence. Monuments are structures created to do exactly that, to commemorate an idea of the past through the construction of highly symbol- ic objects and spaces that are imbued with value, meaning, and, consequently, power over us. Monuments are also active objects that work to remind, advise, warn, and help us visualize and imagine what the future could be.
In Babel explores these tensions by examining ideological territories as barriers of entry to dif- ferent spaces in the city and as thresholds between oppositional relationships. The design and structure of this work actively incorporates and positions the viewers’ spatial engagement in direct confrontation with their human conditioning. It does so by affording them the agency to consume the space as spectators to a spectacle, performer of a ritual, and mediators of tensions. When entering a space that holds high value, humans are physically penetrating a threshold of ideological spaces. The relationships between modernity and history, sacred and profane, ma- terial and immaterial, labor and leisure, tradition and progress are constantly at a threshold that threatens their existence. To resolve this tension, this site-specific monument does not claim tobe sacred, it is rather the center of a spectacle – a sensory experience of thresholds in the city. As a simulation, it seamlessly creates a collective experience of the past, present, and future ex- perienced at once, and as a whole. Click here for video documentation.
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation. 2015
