‘Ala Taraf Lisan Al Ard’

A solo exhibition by visual artist Aziz Motawa, Curated by cultural writer and researcher Malak Al-Suwaihel.

From January 31st to March 2nd 2023, The Sultan Gallery will be exhibiting a visual documentation through the lens of visual artist Aziz Motawa that captures eight years of his treks along the Doha and Sulaibikhat coastal areas in Kuwait and their interwoven narratives of industry and toxicity that play out in their neglected geographies. Earmarking the artist’s inaugural Solo Exhibition, these images of the derelict and overlooked coastal and marshy stretches of Kuwait oscillate between dream-like, wanton vignettes and the industrialized corporeality of human intervention.

This visual project foregrounds the six East to West water desalination plants and outpours in the northern coastal lines of Sulaibikhat and Doha, Kuwait—these outpours frame Kuwait’s water desalination plant, abandoned American military camp, and geographic triangulation of the now demolished Entertainment City theme park, Doha’s nature reserve, and the newly constructed causeway that bridges the densely populated city to this swampy, neglected geography. Aziz’s visuals embody a liminality—a third space—where the natural, industrial, and personal all congeal in the sump and pit of the sewage outpours that populate this geography of mudflats, unifying all realms in the ebb and flow of the area’s intertidal zones. There is a permeability of boundaries throughout these visuals of concrete, wire, and mudflats integrated with diaphanous silhouettes and trace-form shots of an out-of-focus human body counterposed with focused shots of human skin.

Borrowing from Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture, and Identity by Liz Wells (English writer, curator, and lecturer), Robert Naess’s (Norwegian sociologist) extensive research in cultural and technological responses to the threat of climate change, and David Abram’s (American ecologist and philosopher) articulation of “common flesh/body,” lies the distinctive ethos of this project. Examined by curator and artist, “common flesh,” or the deep ecology shared between what is structurally ‘human’ and what is ‘earth,’ expounds on the themes of destruction, adaptation, and revival of an exploited ecology paralleled by the somatic history of abuse on the body. At this junction—a somatic praxis of aligning the body with earth—one can truly understand the magnitude of toxicity in all its forms as an act of abuse against the maligned body of both a marginalized identity and that of a considerably rural landscape.

What remains here is a culmination of fragmented ideas on life and how it settles, how it self-destructs, and how it adapts. Aziz’s visual body of work questions the complexities of interwoven narratives and histories—whether those histories are of an individual’s subjective experience of a landscape or of an environment's moderate shifts over time—shifts that are largely indifferent to memory.

The exhibition contends with the artist’s core principles: an internal dialogue that confronts the ethicality of his intervention of Doha and Sulaibikhat, his subjective documentation of the transience of both their nature and his flawed human memory—bending the artist’s understanding of memory, belonging, and the past.