The individual components in Ala Younis’s works are small – tin soldiers, dioramas, archival documents – but the way they come together, as a constellation of stories threading personal, societal and historical narratives, is monumental.
The Kuwaiti-born Jordanian artist is being featured in a solo exhibition at the New York University Abu Dhabi Art Gallery. Titled Past of a Temporal Universe, the exhibition brings together two decades of work and can be considered a mid-career retrospective.
In her practice, Younis draws from her background as an architect to build sprawling bodies of work that often reference landmark modernist structures as a departure point.
From Egypt’s High Dam to the Le Corbusier-designed Baghdad Gymnasium, Younis begins drawing an archival trail, citing films, music, video footage and literature, revealing historical perspectives that alternate between the minute and anecdotal to sweeping ones ingrained in the region’s collective consciousness.
“The way we decided to organise the exhibition is not chronologically, but in thematic groupings,” says Maya Allison, founding director of the Art Gallery and chief curator at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Many of these themes are present in the opening space of the exhibition, in a way offering, more than an introduction, disparate clues and elements for the viewer to piece together further on. “We have sort of the keys to the different things you’ll see later in the exhibition,” Allison says.
The keys are replete in the centre-space installation – a minimalist representation of the Aswan High Dam looming in an unignorable magenta from a matching platform. A mobile structure is positioned off to the side, its hanging steel rods swaying against the air billowing from a soviet-era fan. There are panels and stout columns, all in matching magenta, positioned throughout.
The installation is visually compelling, if a bit perplexing at first. But, as a corresponding map reveals what the elements stand for, it becomes clear that the arrangement is more meticulous than it initially seems.
The platform is described as the dam site. The steel mobile structure, comprising three arched bodies, represent the three edits of Youssef Chahine’s film on the dam. The column is an actress. The panels are the soldiers used as extras. The central piece is described as “Nasser as dam”, alluding to how the Egyptian leader – Gamal Abdel Nasser – saw the structure as a symbol of national sovereignty and modernisation.
“Each component in the research on high dam gets a form of its own,” Younis says. “For instance, Gamal Abdel Nasser is depicted in a painting as a dam, with water coming out of his belly. It’s basically a modern pyramid, both him and his national project.”
While the map helps in understanding the magenta installation, the installation prepares us for everything that comes in the following room – entirely dedicated to Younis’s project on the high dam.
Younis began the project in 2015 and it has become her longest-running series. Through archival documents, photographs, vinyl records, model structures and illustrations, Younis unpacks how the Aswan High Dam, constructed between 1960 and 1970 under Nasser, with financial and technical support from the Soviet Union, became a national project, its symbolism bolstered by artists, composers, filmmakers and writers, many of whom were commissioned by the two governments.
Younis lays bare the breadth of this cultural output, with a kaleidoscopic lens that prompts us to reconsider this historic moment. From photographs showing the 1968 relocation of the Abu Simbel temple to higher ground to save it from being submerged by the dam’s reservoir lake, to stills from Chahine’s films on the dam, each of which vary in tone and message. The Nile and the Life (1968), was commissioned as a grand epic, but was ultimately rejected by the Egyptian and Soviet governments. It was remade into Those People of the Nile (1972), a work that Chahine saw as a blemish in his filmography, and a final 1999 version, which restored the film to Chahine’s original vision.
A vinyl player, positioned in the exhibition space, sounds Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian’s famed score for Chahine’s 1968 film, as well as a funkier reworked version that was used for the 1972 release, subtly stating Chahine’s facetious sentiments regarding Those People of the Nile.
Then there are blueprints of the projects, images of official meetings and perhaps, most curiously of all, scans of Sonallah Ibrahim’s 1974 novel August Star, which also reveal the facts behind the national narrative that was circulating at the time. The novel tells the story of a journalist who, upon visiting the High Dam construction site, finds out that reports about the project are heavily scrutinised and controlled, with little mention of the deaths that resulted in the mismanagement and oversights of the first phase. The national accomplishment is, instead, revealed to be “nothing more than bits of sand and rock”, as translated by the blog Arab Hyphen.
Ibrahim is also represented in the preceding magenta-coloured installation, with a panel leaning over “Nasser as dam”, on which are scribbled excerpts from the novel.
“He was a communist, and was, in fact, in prison when they were making the plan to build the High Dam,” Younis says “But he was released because the Soviet Premier came to celebrate with Nasser. One year after his release, he comes to the site. He spent a three month-residency, there, going around the construction site, meeting everybody who works there, and then produced this novel on the relationships inside the dam.”
Contrasting artefacts of the national rhetoric with accounts, such as those by Sonallah, Younis assembles a vantage point that offers a comprehensive view of a particular historical moment. Her work and studies are complemented within the exhibition with paintings from the Barjeel Art Foundation that also touch upon the same time period – with works such as Ragheb Ayad’s Aswan (1964) and Hamed Ewais’s Le Gardien de la vie (1967-1968), which was painted in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and shows an oversized soldier standing guard over Egyptians engaged in daily activities.
Younis’s excavation of the narratives of power continues in several other projects, including the Baghdad Gymnasium, which was designed by the famous Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier and formerly known as the Saddam Hussein Gymnasium.
Much like how Younis unravels societal and political connections from the High Dam, she highlights similar links by using the gymnasium as a pivoting point, using figurines, archival materials, sketches and excerpts from literary and academic sources. Rifat Chadirji, a luminary of modern Iraqi architecture; Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid; German-American architect Walter Gropius; and of course, Le Corbusier and Saddam Hussein all appear in some form throughout, as do the marginalised perspectives of women, all coming together as a stirring insight of modern Iraqi history.
“She's actually mapping people, places, moments and then she will tell a little bit of a story and include images, and you begin to piece them all together,” Allison says. “You become an active rather than a passive reader of the work, and then it’s like you’re solving a mystery to figure out how these texts fit together.”
The exhibition moves on to other modes of storytelling, from textiles and mosaics depicting modernist architecture from across the Arab world, to meticulously crafted dioramas, recreating scenes that reflect on the rise of daytime television in the Arab world in the 1960s, to sprawling armies of tin soldiers, showing the nine standing armies that shaped regional geopolitics in 2010, just before the Arab Spring.
As a whole, Past of a Temporal Universe invites visitors to become part of an ongoing investigation. Younis’s work does not set out to reduce history to an allegory or a few symbolic stand-ins, rather it reflects upon the various parts that work together – sometimes in conjunction and other times antagonistically – to create the panorama that becomes written or perceived history, stressing how our understanding of the past is informed by where and how we look.
Past of a Temporal Universe is running at the NYUAD Art Gallery until January 18
