Elizabeth Xi Bauer is happy to current COBRA, an exhibition of latest works by Shadi Al-Atallah, a London-based Saudi artist identified for emotionally charged figurative work that inhabit liminal areas between intimacy and battle. Whereas themes of identification, queerness, and spirituality stay central to his follow, COBRA marks a putting transformation—shifting from the painterly to the immersive, from the singular picture to a multi-sensory world of video, sound, object, and light-weight.
Al-Atallah’s figures—typically genderless, fragmented, or in states of transformation—resist binary readings and evoke a terrain of contradictions. Drawing on non secular mythology, literature, science, and gender concept, his visible language returns to the physique: bare, unbound, and in movement.
On the centre of COBRA are three large-scale video projections forged onto suspended curtains of material that curve and ripple by way of the gallery just like the physique of a serpent. These shifting photos draw from Al-Atallah’s analysis into archival footage of queer males and transfeminine individuals in Saudi Arabia dancing collectively—intimate, spontaneous gestures of pleasure, affection, and defiance. The footage, sourced from digital archives, speaks to misplaced histories and fragile types of visibility. The exhibition title takes its title from the net alias COBRA, belonging to a type of featured within the footage, whom Al-Atallah later found, by way of feedback on-line, had handed away.
In COBRA, these fragments of digital reminiscence are closely reworked and abstracted—reworked right into a sensuous chiaroscuro of sunshine and shadow that remembers the expressive brushwork of his work. “Though the present is honouring and reinterpreting, haunting is an important aspect as nicely,” the artist explains. “I wished it to really feel like stepping right into a portal the place time is warped.” The degraded high quality of the video and sound underscores this temporal dislocation, evoking what the artist calls a “resurrection of misplaced digital ghosts.” This sentiment anchors the exhibition’s conceptual stakes, inviting audiences to have interaction with histories which can be each private and political. These items resurrect forgotten photos of queer intimacy and rework them into collective reminiscence and embodied presence.
The projections are accompanied by a constellation of sculptural objects—a chair stacked with folded thobes perched on a tile; a stiffened conventional male Arab garment illuminated from inside; and a speaker stand with a balloon machine blowing towards a drum. These uncanny assemblages act as bodily interruptions within the area, guiding motion and framing visibility. Close by, a brand new collection of acrylic work on canvas extends the exhibition’s visible and emotional vocabulary, returning to the physique in movement and echoing themes of disappearance and resistance.
Collectively, the works in COBRA kind an immersive set up that dissolves the boundaries between portray, cinema, and efficiency. Al-Atallah’s world-building invitations viewers to inhabit an area the place queer histories are concurrently resurrected and reimagined, and the place intimacy and erasure coexist as acts of resistance.
This exhibition is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes.
