Areej Kaoud - Exhibition Review

This article was originally published in ArtAsiaPacific

Concerning herself with how our body and mind construct notions of language, belonging and security, Palestinian artist Areej Kaoud experiments with performance art and readymade sculptures as way to provoke interaction between the artwork and audience. Intersecting between public and private spaces, Kaoud forces us to acknowledge our unique physical and visual interpretations.

Areej Kaoud, Emergency Brigade, performance, 2016; image courtesy of Daniella Baptista

As part of Art Dubai’s Artist-in-Residency program this year, Kaoud’s Brigade D’Urgence (2016) questions how repetitive body movements and unforeseen gestures simulate narratives of emergency disaster scenarios. The artist staged a total of seven performances throughout the duration of fair. Each features a line of people dressed in emergency gear and marching in unison, with every person blowing a whistle and shining a flashlight into the crowd. Forcing the viewers to gauge the security of the space, Kaoud’s work combines a level of discomfort and tension with curiosity—something most definitely observed by those who peered their heads out of the gallery booths, wondering what was going on.

In addition to strategies of performance art, Kaoud activates a space and experiments with the interchangeable meaning of a work through curatorial practice. In March 2015 she initiated “CollaCurating,” a collaborative series at Tashkeel in which she works one-on-one with an established artist to explore how artwork installations become a space for interaction. In the first iteration, entitled “CollaCurating: Sculptural Perspectives” (2015), Kaoud partnered with Saudi Arabian multimedia artist Manal al-Dowayan. Shifting verbal conversation to one expressed through artworks, Kaoud used al-Dowayan’s neon-lit Arabic phrases as the starting point of the exhibition. Kaoud’s own readymade sculptures such as an aluminum teapot lid, This Is Not a Sunset (2014), reflect the emitted light of Dowayan’s We Were Together Speaking Through Silence (2010) to form a visual exchange between the object and the overwhelming neon presence. Set within the dimly lit installation space, al-Dowayan’s neon tubes transfer a channel of energy onto Kaoud’s surrounding works. By recontextualizing her works among those by al-Dowayan, Kaoud challenges presupposed ideas of her practice, opening it up to wider interpretations.