The Black Arch Mecca-AlUla - 3rd edition 2022

Under Patronnage of The Royal Commission for AlUla“What Lies Within” exhibition from the Basma AlSulaiman collection.
photos credits : RCU
All rights reserved to ©Shadia Alem - Reproduction Prohibited

The Black Arch concept

"I smile to the playful whispers of the place' spirits"
The Black Arch is the first city, which moves with us in every city mirroring and reflecting what we are on whatever and whomever we meet. In The Black Arch I revealed the homeland or birth point which triggers endless moments of birth, leading our journey through the unknown to what is beyond the darkness, to the intense Light. 

Every reflection is a crossing, is an open dialogue with the universe, such a simple reminiscent of what’s invisible in us beyond the visible, the possible beyond the impossible, the stardust and the mirroring sky. 

 the miniatures for AlUla- Mecca edition:

Because Al-Ula served as the crossroads of the Incense Road, the Silk Road, and the al-Hajj Road, Mecca and Al-Ula became associated over time with two basic human needs: trade and spirituality.

When I visited Al-Ula recently, I heard the spirits of this place whispering to me. I followed their instructions and came across miniatures depicting these three important factors in Mecca and Al-Ula, inspiring me to bring the past back to life by merging it with the present.

I took out parts of the miniatures and added them to some of the photos I had taken of Al-Ula and Mecca, travelling back and forth between the two cities with them. 

I imagined that these figures reappear in these places, or that their memory still resonates, a déjà vu to overcome boundaries, to say that we are not separated from our past or future, not from the forms of art over time: civilization, creation expands, there is no past, no present, no future, imaginary or real, there is a unity, a oneness, there is a state of one journey in forms and in time, human time, the time of creativity.

My smile of miniatures is my response to the whispers I have heard from the playful spirits of these places;

The Black Arch - 1st edition Venice Biennale

The Installation which represented Saudi Arabia 54 Venice Biennale
Photo credits : Andrea Avezzù

VIDEOS

General concept of the Black Arch

It was November 15th 2010, we were in Marco Polo airport waiting for our delayed flight due to the airport’s strike when suddenly we became aware that, it’s the pilgrimage season in our home city of Mecca, and pilgrims from all over the world were traveling to Mecca while we were traveling in the other direction, towards Venice to live the Arsenal's atmosphere and to create an artwork for the 54thBiennale, we thought here is the connection , the two cities share things in common  . Our minds were busy looking for an inspiration when the name of Marco Polo brought to focus the act of traveling ,which is a sort of a pilgrimage of Art , physically or mentally as a vital mean to connect and to transfer illumination.

It triggered the journey we made and are still making from Mecca to the world, and now to this city of seven seas and 455 bridges. Thus, this installation symbolizes our crossing from the black to what lies behind; from the personal to the universal , the sphere of creations or nations inhabiting each one of us while being ceaselessly exposed to the world.

This work digs my memory of the black, rooted in three elements: our black covering assimilating with the black cloth of God’s home Al-K’aba, the Black Stone believed to enhance knowledge when kissed, since it was brought from Heaven by angel Gabriel and fixed on the corner of the Ka'bato mark the begging of the circumambulation, and my grandmother's bedtime tale adopted from The One Thousand And One Night*: telling of a king, who fell in love with an unnoticed ordinary girl. He carried her to his throne, and led her through his palace’s unimagined grandeurs, then he reached to the top of the palace, and the room of thousand arched doors.

" as a warning forever, you can go through any of these, but, whatsoever, DO NOT PASS THROUGH THIS BLACK ARCH!” The king said to his newlywed peasant queen.

The queen eventually went through the black arch, which would be -what my grandmother underlined as- her downfall: to get lost in cities deep in their foreignness, deep in their unknowns.. she would go through an intimidating struggle, needless to follow.

What the queen encountered triggered a great question mark in my imagination, and the curiosity towards what lays behind.

Kissing the Black Stone, or more correctly, being in the Mosque, brought us in incredible contact not only with heaven but with human beings of all nations, coming to perform the pilgrimage rituals. A contact that exposed us in an early age to a field of some universal energy, we grew up not in one culture but in multi-cultures, embodied in colors, codes of languages, channels of thought, which deepened my hunger to build up that multi-identity, and here came the travels I was privileged to make through my life, I carried my already inhabited-with-cosmopolitan-cultures cube or city reflecting it on the world and reflecting the world.

This diluting nomadic nature is what I am trying to convey through my installation, mapping the cultural transfusion within me, the round spheres reflecting each other and the world around and creating a constant field of exchanged illumination, going in circle after circle enveloping our world, with the vertical reflective arch recharging that expanding nation, ensuring a free flow of visions between the earthy and the heavenly, on a watery surface like that carrying both Mecca and Venice to existence, or that –as we grew up believing- carrying God’s throne, a throne not barracked with mountains or volcanoes but with supple water.

With the arch or ark and round spheres, I insist on the factor of crossing, bridging, reflecting, and investing in the tries to make a difference and overcome obstacles, thus I engaged the ancient pebbles form Mozdalifah in Mecca, used by pilgrims to stone their devil or what I call it the negative moments. I artistically took those pebbles out of their religious context using them as miniatures sculptures, chiseled by human touches through the centuries. The same as forming my blueprints of Mecca and Venice using the ancient cloth of the Al-K’aba which 1/5 of the world’s population turns to, no cloth is seen with as much eyes, or touched by as many hands and hopes, a print of energy I engaged to create a field of energy I detect running between the two cities, allowing them to have a free exchange of inspiration, bringing to life my artistic City out of their mixture,where cultures, art and civilizations blend together harmoniously. A culmination of the journey I made from Mecca to Venice.

Creativity --with its implication of free movement and joyful experimenting-- is the universal tongue and nation, what bridges our various cultures without languages, and its transfer is what keeps the world going, because once this artistic exchange of illumination stops the world would shrink and come to its end.  I adopted the voices of life in the two cities of Mecca and Venice, and the watery nature which ensures the maximum suppleness and fluidity and at the same time irresistible chiseling force and penetration, the element we engaged in our real life and helped us going through whatever came in our creative way.

* a theme about of a forbidden passage not to be crossed,  which appeared in the 500th night of the One Thousand And One Night (page 67, 3rd volume, the national Dar Al-Huda for publication, Beirut Lebanon, first edition 1981 + p210 night 585 + p212 night 586

Technique/Structure

Stainless-steel, cast-iron, wood, cotton fabric, 3457 chrome coated cast-iron spheres.
Dimensions : 3.50 x 7.00 x 3.50 metres

1- base : steel plates / thickness : 15 mm / 5 parts / Total weight : 1,4 T
2- balls : chromed steel / 3457 balls / Total weight : 2,1 T
3> ellipse : steel structure (which can be dismantled) mounted on a 200 mm steel HEA
- 3 mm stainless steel plates mounted on aluminium frames / 6 parts
- bottom of the ellipse : wood and black fabric
Total weight : 750 kg

4> cube : steel structure and 3 mm stainless steel. 1000 x 1000 x 1000 mm. Weight : 120 kg
Audio Visual : Projected digital images and sounds
30 minutes

Photo making of

Photos : courtesy Tala Alem and Raja Alem.