{"id":47908,"date":"2023-10-02T20:27:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-02T16:27:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/?p=47908"},"modified":"2023-10-02T20:27:01","modified_gmt":"2023-10-02T16:27:01","slug":"adel-abidin-unveils-ithra-art-prize-winning-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/adel-abidin-unveils-ithra-art-prize-winning-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Adel Abidin unveils Ithra Art Prize winning work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Adel Abidin, the Helsinki-based Iraqi-Finnish artist who was named as the winner of the Ithra Art Prize\u2019s 5th edition<\/a>, has unveiled the winning piece in the great Hall of Ithra (the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture) \u2013 a large-scale wall-hung piece titled ON (in Arabic: Aan), which draws together threads of selective memory, the fallibility of history and lost oral storytelling traditions.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work is made of Japanese rice paper layered with starchy glue, a technique that Abidin effectively had to learn to achieve his goals. A repeated stamp of the word Aan form a surreal, abstract image of Basra, with the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowing over the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mural resulted from a year\u2019s research by Abidin into the Zanj rebellion against the Abbasid Caliphate (it took place from 869 till 883) and is based on scenes Abidin imagined while reading stories of the revolt. \u201cThe aim of the rebellion was to free slaves and seek social justice, which interested me,\u201d Abidin told The National. \u201cSo I dug deeper and noticed that most of what I was reading is all rewritten accounts based on the word of someone else, who heard the news from someone else \u2013 like Chinese whispers \u2013 and it would say \u2018Aan'” (Aan in Arabic roughly translates here as \u2018on the authority or account of\u2019 this or that person).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Adel Abidin talking about his technique during the Ithra announcement<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an old way of oral storytelling and whenever I read a passage with Aan, I liked that it gives history this intangible, vulnerable aspect. I wanted to create a single piece that really represented the feeling I got when doing this research, this fragility of history.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, history is often intangible, and it can be a challenge to find reliable archival sources. Arab history in particular is often shrouded in ambiguity, especially from Abbasid times, with a wide range of interpretations and augmentations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Zanj rebellion was a 15-year-long slave revolt around Basra in the South of Iraq that reportedly led to the deaths of tens of thousands. The Zanj themselves originally came from East Africa, though the uprising also involved other groups and its leader Ali bin Muhammad, a slave-descended Arab, is thought to have originated in present day Iran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Ali was able to maintain a fifteen-year rebellion, and develop not only an army of thousands of slaves but his own polity, with a capital in Contemporary historians \u2013 notably Al-Tabari and Al-Mas\u2019udi \u2013 give a lot of detail but only selectively, and they obviously detest the Zanj and the revolt\u2019s leader. But they don\u2019t tell us how the rebellion proceeded with apparent success for so long, involving for instance the establishment of its own cities and civic authorities (plunder in one suggestion from modern historians of the period); or whether Ali\u2019s claim to be descended from Ali ibn Talib, a companion of the Prophet, is at all well-founded; or even why the alternative theology he proposed was so attractive to the rebels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course it\u2019s the victors who write history. \u201cWe don\u2019t have anything written by the Zanj, so we will never know their side of history,\u201d said Abidin. \u201cI started thinking in their shoes, how they reacted and how I could start creating their own identity in the story.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So each Aan stamp in the mural represents different accounts of the rebellion\u2019s history, with the many layers of paper and overlapping stamps suggesting the number and sometimes contradictory nature of the stories. Abidin talked about himself becoming a contributor to the story by creating the new multi-layered account. \u201cThis resonates with the stress of the stamping \u2013 if you stamp hard you get a strong ink imprint, or if used lightly it leaves only a trace.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selected by an independent jury from over 10,000 submissions, Abidin was awarded $100,000 plus the full funding required to bring his project to life \u2013 unsurprisingly, the Ithra Art Prize is the largest art grant in the region. The work is now part of Ithra\u2019s permanent art collection in Dahran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Adel Abidin, the Helsinki-based Iraqi-Finnish artist who was named as the winner of the Ithra Art Prize\u2019s 5th edition, has unveiled the winning piece in the great Hall of Ithra (the King Abdulaziz Centre for World Culture) \u2013 a large-scale [… more]<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47909,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,100],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-art","category-competition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}