Of Land and Water brings works from SAF Collection to Kalba

Partially inspired by the coastal setting of Kalba city, the exhibition is an inquiry into our understanding of borders and statehood, as well as a reflection on the interconnectedness represented by fluid waterways. The title draws from the Malay word for homeland, tanah air, which combines the words ‘land’ (tanah) and ‘water’ (air). The linking of static land and fluid waterways creates a notion of belonging that poetically reflects the archipelagic nature of the region. However, this same term took on a paradoxical new intonation during Indonesia’s War of Independence (1945–1949), when it was used as a term for solidifying a unified nation and discriminating those who do not fit the nation-state dogma.

Reflecting this symbolic turn, Of Land and Water raises the following questions: how do borders and ideologies attempt to contain open stretches of earth and sea, and divide those who inhabit them? What ties us to a place, and what severs us from it? Which ways of living and knowledge can move freely across borders, unbound by race and political ideas like the winds and tides?

The exhibition opens with Babak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai’s video Plate It with Silver (2015), which investigates the rumoured ability of spirits to pass freely along the shores of the Strait of Hormuz. Through its collage of first-hand footage and field recordings, the film doubles as a portrait of the unofficial circulation of both people and goods over the waters. The work is paired with Beroana (shell money) IV (2016) by Taloi Havini, which replicates traditional seashell currency from Bougainville, Papua New Guinea. These ‘shell money’ are used not only for trade but also as ceremonial adornment, maintaining culturally-specific forms of value in spite of state centralisation of national currencies.

Walid Siti uses vacant flags (False Flags, 2017) and a ghostly, mapless landscape (Phantom Land, 2017) to suggest homeland as a fragile, imagined space. His works bring forth the fragility and precariousness of belonging that are shaped by geopolitical turmoil and collective memory. Closer to home, the artist collective GCC considers the relationship between the nation and its values with Positive Pathways (+) (2016), an installation informed by state-led health campaigns, promoting wellness, optimism and vitality in the Gulf.

The exhibition continues with Nabil El Makhloufi’s three paintings—The Consideration, Night Veil and The Approach (all 2021)—that capture feelings of alienation and community within the processes of migration and cultural hybridsation. Nesrine Khodr’s Extended Sea (2017), a 12-hour shot of the artist swimming continuous laps in an outdoor pool framed by the Mediterranean Sea, features a confluence of physical and conceptual boundaries. Marwan Rechmaoui indicates the impermanence of nations and their borders with Lebanon by the Sea (2017), which delineates Beirut’s shifting coastline, while Monument for the Living (2001–2008), a scale model of the 34-storey Burj Al Murr, memorialises a past marked by destruction, loss and instability.

Jompet Kuswidananto nods to the complex history of Indonesia and the symbolism of tanah air with Keroncong Concordia (2019). The installation revives the Societeit Concordia, an elite, nineteenth-century Bandung social club known for segregating its clientele by racial and ethnic divisions, even as it earned a reputation for playing a distinctly multicultural style of music. The exhibition concludes with the three-screen film installation Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah, which blends archival footage with staged scenes to juxtapose different narratives of the sea, such as migration, whaling, environmental collapse and the refugee crisis. The sense of discord is emphasised by the film’s sequencing, which results in a hallucinatory view of collective social realities.

Throughout these works, the ambitions of the postcolonial nation-state are juxtaposed with the grief of those who have been deprived of their native land or whose fragmented identities go unrecognised by the state. Water appears alternately as a border that defines territories, a gateway to the unknown and an open network that allows mythologies, histories and cultural to seep through artificial divides.

Of Land and Water is curated by Jiwon Lee, Head of Curatorial, and Abdulla Aljanahi and Amal Al Ali, Curatorial Assistants, with Souraya Kreidieh and Shahd Murshed, Collection Department.