areej kaoud: mishmish
29 February - 21 March 2020, Preview- 28 February, 6 - 8 pm
indigo+madder is proud to present Palestinian artist Areej Kaoud’s first solo exhibition, mishmish and performance, you want watermelon.
Areej’s complex and layered works explore various emotional states arising from instability and duress through text, performance and installation. A state of anxiety is a daily reality for the residents of many regions embroiled in discord and political tension. Referencing her own experiences of growing up in Palestine and moving to Canada as a refugee, she explores anxiety as a tool of survival, which helps prepare for both known and unknown dangers. An accompaniment of anxiety is often an overwhelming sense of impending doom that seemingly feels endless. In the experience of being uprooted from one’s home and embarking on a journey to find refuge, a sense of belonging is sometimes elusive even when the actual journey ends.
Within this scenario, Kaoud’s paintings are assertive and defiant gestures of belonging, tinged with humour and playfulness. They reflect a struggle to gain a sense of rootedness and assuage the sense of anxiety that comes from being disconnected from one’s home. The texts in the paintings play with Arabic expressions and the names of the fruits they illustrate. Mishmish is an apricot in the Palestinian dialect. The apricot painting reads mish mashee, an expression which could mean both ‘I am not leaving’ and ‘it is not ok’. Bideesh batteekh translates to ‘I do not want watermelon’. Colloquially, the other meaning of the Arabic word for watermelon, batteekh, is bullshit. The phrase bideesh batteekh is also used to express the desire to not accept any nonsense from anyone. In conversational Arabic, the painting of the lemon proclaims ‘it’s not ripe’ (mish misstwiyya).
Through her sound pieces, Kaoud creates an immersive labyrinth with words, easing us into a state of being with an ongoing sense of anxiety, reminding us how pervasive and all-encompassing it can be. The pieces, recited by Kaoud herself are meditative and her flow of thoughts seems to defy a sense of time. Over the course of her participative performance, you want watermelon, Kaoud explores control and submission by mimicking the conditions prevalent during emergency provisions, especially rationing and the spread of propaganda. Offering watermelon to the audience, a symbolic gift, Kaoud compels us to think about the mechanisms of control. She gradually sets up conditions to remove choice and volition from the scenario altogether.
The event is free and unticketed. All welcome.
Areej Kaoud (b. 1987) is a Palestinian visual artist raised in Gaza, Palestine and Montreal, Canada. Her practice draws on her interest in a variety of narratives and disastrous scenarios. Kaoud’s practice incorporates text, sound, performance and installation to comment on emergency provisions and their enactment. Kaoud’s projects articulate the distance between anxiety, vigilance and even humour which are all a part of the preparations undertaken for non-immediate threats. Kaoud’s most recent performance in the UK was at the Tate Modern in Tate Exchange in January 2018. In 2019, she was commissioned by the New York University Art Gallery to produce a large-scale sculpture titled Unknown Safety 2019 and the recordings An Escalation (2016-Ongoing). Kaoud’s work has been shown at Delfina Foundation, Art Dubai, Bolivia Biennale, ISCP New York, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, The Hangar, JPFN Museum and Satellite in AlSerkal Avenue. Kaoud completed an MFA at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and a second masters in Fine Art Curating at Goldsmiths College. Kaoud has worked as an Adjunct Professor at American University of Sharjah and copy editor at Sharjah Art Foundation. She currently lives and works between Sharjah and London.
