This month, Contemporary Art Platform Kuwait is hosting Mohammed Alkouh‘s first solo exhibition. Alkouh, whose work was recently acquired by the Dutch Royal Tropical Institute, will be showing a recent set of studio portraits, complemented by Tomorrow’s Past, an existing body of cityscapes that examines the current state of the country’s modernist buildings. Both series are executed using a classical technique in photography, that of hand-coloring silver gelatin prints.
When viewing Alkouh’s work, we should bear in mind that Kuwait is a relatively young nation, which gained independence from the British protectorate in 1961. The oil that would change everything was discovered in 1937, but large scale production and export started only in 1951. In less than a century, Kuwait City changed from a traditional trading post on the shores of the Persian Gulf to a globally connected hub for the petrochemical industry. In the first decades of the oil boom period, the built environment transformed from adobe houses rarely rising above two or three levels into a city dreaming of modernism, which is now being replaced by ultra-high rise architecture dictated by the uniformity of globalization.
Within the span of a mere three generations, its people were confronted with transformations of their socio-economic circumstances, their political space, the demographic profile of their population and their environment. How individuals digest these profound changes and how the traditions of a people are affected by them is hard to fathom for outsiders. What is apparent however, is that this fleetingness, acceleration and instability is accutely sensed by the younger generations, and translated into a search for identity.
For Alkouh, this identity is closely linked to his personal memories, which were shaped as much by recurring tours of the city with his father, to which Tomorrow’s Past pays tribute, as by the playfulness and imagination of his mother, who awakened in him a love for stories told and acted out. It is the latter which gave rise to his latest series of studio portraits. A curtain serves as the recurring backdrop to scenes staged in the manner of 19th century ‘tableaux vivants’, the origins of which are hidden from the uniniated viewer, as are the stories behind it, which he reserves to share with his audience in person.
In doing so, Alkouh plays into a tradition of orality that has continued to be a well-known method of preserving Arab culture and transmitting it to succeeding generations. Moreover, the act of telling creates an encounter between the viewer and the maker that breathes life into the images, and imbues the work with a meaning that a static text could never convey. By placing the personal at the core of his work, we find his efforts are ultimately directed at regaining a human scale of things. His photography allows him to reconcile past and future histories, and create a sense of place in the present.
Alkouh’s work and practice winds its way through a further field of connected topics, ranging from 80s Kuwaiti sitcoms, water management and submarine springs, to the use of Instagram to do business, vernacular photographic archives in the Gulf, the structure of music sung by pearl divers, or the emergence of post-oil art. A selection of these will be woven into a variegated mesh of blog posts published by Stead Bureau during Kuwait Weeks, kicked off by a conversation with Mohammed Alkouh.
EXHIBITION
Mohammed Alkouh
April 10-19, 2014
Contemporary Art Platform
2nd Floor
Life Center
Industrial Shuwaikh Block 2, St 28
Kuwait
http://www.mohammedalkouh.com/
http://steadbureau.org
Conversation with Alkouh: http://www.beikey.net/mrs-deane/?p=7948
