Mona Ayyash: The Clock Doesn’t Care

For her first solo exhibition, the culmination of the artist’s participation in the 2024 cycle of the 421 Artistic Development Program, Ayyash presents a collaborative video piece focusing on small body movements. Created with a group of actors, dancers, and performance artists selected through an open call, the piece is a study of repetitive non-functional movements, without purpose or productivity, that questions the tension between passing time and wasting time.

The collaborators filmed themselves responding to movement prompts, encouraging them to consider what ‘doing nothing’ looks like; Ayyash extracts fragments of the collected footage and edits them to be layered one over the other or side-by-side, constantly changing, accumulating, and subtracting. The everyday and the mundane are themes highlighted in work, as the bodies are stuck repeating their movements in a loop, going nowhere. Without a clear narrative to hold the spectator’s attention, the exhibition serves as a playful inquiry into the objective nature of time.

This project grew from the artist’s earlier participation in the Homebound Residency Program in 2020, where she produced a video work titled Folding Bellies in collaboration with five participants from the UAE art community.

To 25 August.