Canvas

Memories are often manifest in overlooked ways. Liquified solids, traces on fabric, vanishing landscapes. They all measure time and change, a perspective conveyed in the works of Gülşah Mursaloğlu, Majd Abdel Hamid, and Nasser Al Zayani in The Memory In Our Bones. A text by Saira Ansari accompanies the show, describing how memories can also inhabit our bodies. “We classify them as side effects,” she writes, “responses to lived experiences and trauma; conditions to fix... But should we try to send it away, or could we instead massage it into our bones so that we can live with it?”

Entering the exhibition space, one was confronted by the overpowering presence of Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s Merging Fields, Splitting Ends (Sequence III) (2021). Blue wires covered the floor, hooked to multiple USB wall plugs at one end and to various heated copper and ceramic vessels filled with water at the other. Two long cascading strips of white material hung from the ceiling above them, made from sewn-together square pieces of potato plastic. The ribbons stretched across the ground and over the containers, vapour slowly dissolving them. This installation is a continuation of the artist’s experimentations with materials sourced from below our feet. “How we relate to the materials in our surroundings has always been peculiar to me because we see them in a very transformed state,” says Mursaloğlu. “But actually, most of those things come from the underground, they’re extracted from the earth.” The artist rejects the understood function of her unassuming materials, trusting their monumentality through changes in form. “I don’t necessarily think that the artwork has to be something stable or that it needs to be preserved forever. So I want to recognise that agency, and I think making that unfolding or transformation part of the process and presenting it in the space also alludes to the earlier memories of the materials.”