Linguists say that anything that surrounds something is a frame.
While you wonder at Hussain Al Ismail’s first exhibition named Etar ”frame” held at Desert designs gallery here from April 18 -28, you are reminded that not only do arts transcend and intertwine but everything in this universe is pushed to either concur or confront, even in the game of daily communication and the social cybernetic spaces.
The exhibition accommodates the alternation between social criticism and artistic practice that never ceases to show its artistic tendency to mix image, sound, and performance together.
Since Hussain is obsessed with the game of frames, we are unconsciously pushed to step into a frame of no definite shape; a stage open to the paradoxical melody of musical argument between the flute and the cello and a mural built for anonymous electronic debates and the actions forming and establishing a cluster of photographic frames in which the material frame itself becomes a tiny unit among multiplying frames on the edge of repetition and contrast.
It was Al Ismail’s wish not to restrain himself to any frame but to combine all the arts and the situations with a high desire to give the theatrical sense a major presence in his artistic space starting with a musical piece under the spotlight. He moves on to the presence of people scattered in his artworks and ends the master frames as an intriguing piece of decorative vocabulary.
Al Ismail didn’t conceal his enthusiasm about making this experience a contemporaneous one, for he pointed it out in his description of the exhibition.
The rarefaction of the artistic unit is one of the clues that show his contempt for the traditional patterns and his pursuit of a contemporary basis for the formation of a new transcending artistic action. Even the theatrical presentation of the frames is in itself an impulsive attempt to come close to recent former experiences that examine the link between the artwork and the theatrical performance.
There is no room for ambiguity when we look at the aims and the goals of the exhibition. But this doesn’t minimize the difficult task of striking a balance between the multiple artistic orchestras within the exhibition and the alteration in an unstable aesthetic area and liberating it from an artistic frame, and in doing so giving it a unique individuality.
“I am against restraining the attempts to go out of the box and forming artistic equations which define the artist’s path in his approach,” he said.
Discovering the potential connections and the controversial moments between the aesthetic styles requires an intelligent investment in the intermediate connection that originates from this friction between the different arts. However, breaking out of the traditional frames of the artwork and the frames of the daily life haven’t prevented him from remaining within the limits of the local theatrical trends that inspired him with their problematic views.
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