UNPUBLISHED – artistic observations
Presentations and Filmscreening
With the artists Zahrah Alghamdi and Muhannad Shono
Tuesday, February 6, 2018, 5:30 pm
At KAUST Library
5:30-5:40 pm – Welcome by Pierre Magistretti (Dean BESE)
Short introduction of the art-science KAUST-Swiss Residency Exchange project by Pierre Magistretti and Irène Hediger, (Head of artists-in-labs program, Zurich University of the Arts)
5:40-6:20 pm – Presentations by the artists Zahrah Alghamdi and Muhannad Shono, artists-in-residence at Eawag – Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Zurich in 2017, Q&A
6:20-6:50 pm – Screening of residency films:
Marie Griesmar: Beneath the Red Sea – A New Form of Reef, (Reef Genomics Lab)
Sandra Kühne: Into the blue – soft and solid, (Integration Ocean Processes Group)
The residency films of Zahrah Alghamdi: Safar (travel) and Muhannad Shono: living ideas at Eawag, will be exhibited.
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The KAUST-Swiss Residency Exchange is a cooperation with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Pro Helvetia and the artists-in-labs program.
Following the residencies of the Swiss artists Marie Griesmar and Sandra Kühne at KAUST in 2016, hosted by the Biological and Environmental Sciences and Engineering Division, the artists Zahrah Alghamdi and Muhannad Shono from Saudi Arabia spent three months in 2017 at Eawag – the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology in Zurich. During their residencies, they investigated the ecology of alpine and drinking water through their art practice.
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Zahrah Alghamdi grew up in south-western Saudi Arabia where she was surrounded by traditional domestic architecture with artistically decorated rooms. Her art practice is inspired by memories of places related to her childhood. She draws on the idea of ‘embodied memory’ and experiments with translating memory and the feeling of place into spatial installations.
Gesture and the act of ‘creating’ are central to her practice. As a member of the Stream Ecology Group (Department of Aquatic Ecology), Alghamdi has been accompanying and observing scientists on environmental sampling and field data collections. The artist’s personal experience and observations in this landscape inspired her to respond with her own gestures and develop minimal and poetic sculptural interventions on site.
From an early age, Muhannad Shono created comic books in which he incorporated twisted storylines, fictional worlds and drawing. As a naturalized Saudi citizen to Syrian parents of Chechen and Karachay-Cherkessian descent, Shono addresses themes of displacement,
migration and identity throughout his work. He often works with ink and paper, incorporating sculptural, animated and acoustic elements.
During his residency at the Department of Environmental Microbiology, within the Drinking Water Microbiology Group, Shono focused on the origin of bacteria, how they develop, behave and multiply. He developed his own fictional organism which he compares to the organism LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) – the hypothetically last common ancestor of all living organisms. Shono describes his organism as the “physical embodiment of an idea”, and the research laboratories at Eawag as the ideal environment for it to thrive. He then went on to develop a mind-map of idea-organisms that concluded as a site-specific installation at Eawag.
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artists-in-labs program
The artists-in-labs program (ail) facilitates practice-based artistic research by way of long-term residencies for artists in scientific laboratories and research institutes. The ail program offers sustainable collaborations between artists and scientists of all disciplines, in Switzerland and around the world, thereby promoting a culture of creative exchange.
The residencies enable the artists to explore the laboratory as site, to investigate the scientific topics, methods and technologies, as well as to probe and extend experimental and aesthetic dimensions beyond cultural and geographical boundaries. The nature of the residencies is process-based.
Founded in 2003 in Switzerland, the ail program is today an internationally acclaimed and unique concept within its field. It is situated within the Institute for Cultural Studies in the Arts (ICS) at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).