All Islands Connect Underwater

8 Apr-3 Jun 2023

Overview

An exhibition by Asha Athman, Islam Shabana, and Samra Mayanja.

For the last chapter of Confluence, All Islands Connect Underwater brings together three artists whose work approaches historical and contemporary examinations of the sea and other bodies of water as contested cultural, political, legal and socio-economic territories.

Expanding on the notion of the برزخ (barzakh), a state of “in-between”, a liminal space, a margin, and a point of transition, artists Asha Athman, Islam Shabana, and Samra Mayanja explore specific events, situations, and mythologies tied to this realm of stasis, separation, and confluences between borders.

Unfolding through connecting knots and as clusters of islands underwater, the exhibition maps out submerged stories and fragmented worlds, reformulating the possibility for them to re-emerge as interweaved prefigurations of solidarity, belonging, memory, and practice of care.

About the Artists:

Asha Athman is an artist and aspiring educator. Photography and mixed media collage are central to her artistic practice. She is interested in the knowledge and actions produced within and around surfaces. By what it means to be made or unmade visible, estranged and absent. Cutting, layering and weaving, she tries to interrogate surfaces and the political and social understandings they envelop.

Islam Shabana’s work is situated in the intersection of technology with Islamic philosophy, mythology and studies of human cognition. In his works, he explores concepts such as system-social dynamics, religious performative rituals and occult practices, by means of poetry, simulation, science fiction and speculative scenarios. Examining how different technologies are interweaving these concepts producing/reproducing entangling structures between myth, fiction, and physical realities. Within such complex intersectional realms, the digital medium is emphasising the shift in cognitive processes, oscillating the human experience and imagination between reality and hyperreality, human and non-human, physical and mental spaces.

Samra Mayanja is a writer and artist. Her work records and fictionalises the narratives that the living conjure in order to deal with loss. Mayanja’s work is the residue from translations between writing, drawing, film, pedagogy, installation and performance. Her practice is heavily supported by the instability of these translations and how the limits of each medium give life to the next. She has exhibited and performed at the Tetley (Leeds), MAMA (Rotterdam), Kampnagel (Hamburg), Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and lectured at Glasgow School of Art, Museum of London, University of Leeds and UP Projects (London).

Confluence

Confluence is a 1-year programme taking place between Marrakech and Glasgow curated by Alaya Ang, Francesca Masoero and Shayma Nader, and developed by CCA Glasgow & QANAT (a collective platform held by LE 18). This initiative aims to foster and stimulate mutual exchange between artists, curators and cultural practitioners in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and in Scotland in an effort to bring in multiple contextual understandings around water as a political, historical and economic substance.

Confluence articulates through three interrelated strands: a residency programme, a research programme, and a final exhibition in April 2023. Each of these aims to create a framework for artists, researchers, curators, and scholars to engage in conversation and share knowledge around water as a matter and an architecture shaping times, spaces, our ways to relate to, and understand them.