ALIA AHMAD: TERHAL GHEIM
Terhal Gheim (The voyage of clouds) brings together a group of paintings and watercolours that use the desert plateau of Saudi Arabia’s capital Riyadh to explore the rich cultural heritage of storytelling and weaving particular to the nomadic Bedouin tribes.
March 6 – May 18, 2024
Exploring movement as a framework for understanding place and belonging, the artist narrates the convergence of landscape and memory, negotiating the vital role of change, adaptation and remembrance in the migratory rituals of the Bedouin and the environmental and industrial fluctuations of her home city, Riyadh.
Characterised by bold, Fauvist colour, Ahmad’s paintings fuse aggregated space with restive, gestural abandon, within which more intentional structural traceries emerge. Sinewy, linear markings, created through finer impressions of white pastel, charcoal and ink, trace the vegetal patterning of foliage and flora native to the region, naturally segmenting compositions into gestural and tonal zones, where interactions of light and shade and layered impasto colour playfully combine.
Drawing both from real life as well as memory, Ahmad aligns her practice with Bedouin approaches to temporality, rejecting the four-season meteorological paradigm in favour of a more intuitive reliance on daily observations of weather, vegetation and pasture.
Crafted by Bedouin women using locally sourced fibres, Al Sadu textiles are woven in a horizontal style, lending an attuned symmetry to the repetitive, colourful patterning that evoke the rich colour tones of the desert landscape and connect threads of identity, locale and history into each design. Primarily executed on small-scale canvases, Ahmad develops her compositional frameworks much like a weaver setting up their skeleton of threads, beginning with gridded patterning and foundational forms, such as the triangle and diamond, from which to build her abstract designs.
Suspended within narrative realms inspired by Bedouin poetry and folklore, Ahmad’s gestural marks convey a distinctly calligraphic quality, evoking the cursive beauty of Arabic script, which is characterised by its leftward slant and diacritic markings that decorate the written word.
As a witness to her changing surroundings, Ahmad’s paintings occupy a notable place within the contemporary milieu. Emulating the heightened colours and flattened perspectives found in digital graphics, a subject the artist studied prior to painting, Ahmad builds new, imaginary landscapes, informed by the modern world while also summoning the movements undertaken by the people and natural landscapes of her homeland – the voyage of the clouds.