DAMMAM: The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra) is currently exhibiting the works of the five artists shortlisted for the seventh edition of the Ithra Art Prize — Aseel Al-Yaqoub (Kuwait); Bady Dalloul (Syria/France); Heba Y. Amin El-Mahamly (Egypt); Ala Younis (Kuwait); and Jawad Al-Malhi (Palestine).
The Ithra Art Prize is one of the region’s most prestigious art awards, offering the winner a grant of $100,000 and a place in the center’s permanent collection. The exhibition will run until the announcement of the winner in October.
Aseel Al-Yaqoub
‘Flora Incognita’
Al-Yaqoub’s installation of 3D-printed plant sculptures, steel cabinets and graphite drawings “revisits the history of botanical classification in the Gulf and the systems that sought to stabilize it,” according to the exhibition brochure. Commonly, when an unknown plant was discovered, it was named according to what already known plant it most resembled, and a geographic reference was added to the — normally — Latin structure. “In this gesture of recognition,” Al-Yaqoub’s piece asks, “what was altered, and what was secured?” The “plants” in “Flora Incognita” do not, the brochure states “resolve into fixed categories.” Instead, “they exist in a state of suspension, neither fully native nor entirely foreign, neither wholly authentic nor entirely invented.
