Batool Mohammed, Egypt (lives in United Arab Emirates)
Residency Period:
1 October 2013 - 1 April 2014
Bio
Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Batool grew up in Kuwait and currently lives in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, where she works at the Sharjah Art Foundation. She completed a four year BFA at the College of Fine Art and Design at the University of Sharjah and graduated in 2012.
On-hiatus Proposal Summary
Batool is not on Hiatus by choice, in fact, making art has proven a frustrating challenge after she graduated from university. However being officially on Hiatus, she hopes, will take the pressure of needing to make art off of her shoulders, allowing her to resume making it after the period of this residency is over.
Also given the fact that she works at the Sharjah Art Foundation, she often finds herself sarcastically nitpicking at artist statements, biographies and the general wording of art texts; what has been called International Art English (IAE). She also spends lots of time doing conceptual research for upcoming events, which surprisingly results in similar sarcastic deconstruction of texts by established philosophers that she would usually be fascinated by.
For the duration of this residency she proposes to compile all her notes on readings and texts as a series of scans and word documents or other means of entering text on the web page. She will also document her daily life on hiatus which would include the process of furnishing her flat, getting a drivers license, going to art events in Sharjah and Dubai and hopefully not making any art secretly.
Final Report
One day before the start of March Meeting 2014, I met Farid (Rakun) at the office to say hi and get some formalities out of the way. During the few minutes we spoke I manage to condense my experience on RFAOH to one sentence that I paraphrase as accurately as I can; I can be okay with not making anything and still call myself an artist.
This is not to be confused with laziness (please). The anxiety of feeling obliged to make work was enough to drive me away from it, not unlike a stubborn child, but also, the art world’s [implied] obsession of producing a spectacle – even if not visual – factored into the equation. It blew my mind, and perhaps naively so, that there still needs to be a final entity to fund/produce/document/archive/perform/record/etc.
This remains an open question to me, and perhaps the closest of an answer to this issue, is the one reached by the organizers behind RFAOH when they decided to start the residency. I took the time at RFAOH to focus on none of that, hoping that by not searching for it, I’ll notice it sitting outside the doorstep. I can’t say I’ve succeeded too finitely (how ironic) but I have at least, identified my preferred way to work, of having many disconnected things simultaneously going until they all condense into ‘a practice’. Accordingly, going to class, work and anything else I do will factor into said practice; and parallel to that, I’m starting to work on a text-based project similar to my initial proposal for RFAOH which I did not carry out during the residency because it felt too much like… work. Also I was afraid of starting it within RFAOH then not being able to extrapolate from it after the end of the residency since nothing on RFAOH is to be considered art/work. However, I don’t intent to embark on this research with the same smirk on the face of the initial proposal to RFAOH, but rather with a genuine questioning approach that may or may not culminate into a resolute end.
I am also considering documenting said research on my own – now dormant – blog that I started some time back for this very reason, but never got to really take it on. It was also due to being at RFAOH that I came to be more comfortable with the idea- that of virtual space and internet content.
I finally have a minute to post this, in response to Farid Rakun’s post No. 8.
He talked about what you can or cant call yourself within a certain practice, and I’ve had very similar thoughts about what I should (or can) call myself after I graduated, especially since I wasn’t making any work. I wasn’t able to say I’m an art student any more, which was my preferred identification before I graduate… and for a while after graduation I still said that, sometimes adding ‘oh yeah, I just graduated’. It sounded awkward; it was awkward in my head, so I had to find an alternative. ‘I studied art’, ‘I just graduated… art’, and ‘I’m not really doing anything at the moment’ were all used. Eventually I started to use my workplace as the identifier, but never said ‘I’m an artist’… why would I? I wasn’t MAKING anything, I spent a whole lot of time thinking, reading, writing and, stressing about many things, but never made any.
Of course my humble short-lived experience does not compare to Farid’s ten year one, but contrary to the conclusion he reached (or lack of), I had no problem calling myself an artist when I started this residency. I figured that if I’m officially not doing something then I must in a position to be doing it. I hope I make sense… doing everything by doing nothing…
There must be a neat, smart theory out there that articulately describes this, if anyone knows of one, please tell me.
Anyway, my conclusion is, I suppose, that it’s probably more comfortable calling yourself ‘anything’ as long as there’s context to justify it, which is what this residency does, provides context.
Yeah, and "you(we) as the theory" is way more convincing and charming!
Batool wrote on Nov 16:
Farid found the theory! hahahaha... you are right though... one has to bump one's own head, basically
shinobu wrote on Nov 14:
You are the theory, Batool, you are. There are no French dudes who could articulate such as good as we go through this ourselves
Sharjah Book Fair
So my promised post got delayed because I spent last night that the Sharjah Book Fair at the Sharjah Art Foundation booth… seen below:
We don’t usually display Windows 8 screen savers on our screens, this was taken when we were closing up.
The fair was really cool, many a stall had many a book that I would otherwise not have come across. I bought this book (below), which, just by standing there and reading the intro, is very very interesting. Also, standing there and reading in the middle of the human trafick in that corridor earned me a 10 AED discount. Yay for geeky appreciation.
Do forgive any typos, I’m typing as I sleep and the uploader doesn’t have a spell checker.
… or just finished reading “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” by George Orwell, which thoroughly enoyjed. Orwell is a lot funnier than he lets on in Ninteen Eighty Four and Animal Farm, (the only other books of his that I read) though his humor is not without cynicism of course.
pictures of things are nice…
It’s been a quiet day otherwise. I do have some thoughts that were triggered by Farid Rakun’s latest post (N0. 8) which I intend to post tonight/tomorrow morning.
Also the test went… very interestingly… the results will be out in a week “no less”, as the examiner felt the need to add. So will have an update on that too.
Thanks for the promised post. Looking forward to reading it.
Today´s Post
My MBA admission test is tomorrow morning. I’m trying not to worry, though I haven’t touched a number in five years, and I’m sure there will be nothing about deconstructing Baudrillard on that paper.
… *sigh* I wonder what I’m getting myself into.
On a brighter note, and since we have finally hit two days of good weather here in Sharjah, here are more pictures, taken from the rooptop of our offices.
“…But it was Werner’s own session that was attracting much of the buzz. It was titled “Is Earth F**ked?” (full title: “Is Earth F**ked? Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action Activism”).
Standing at the front of the conference room, the geophysicist from the University of California, San Diego walked the crowd through the advanced computer model he was using to answer that question. He talked about system boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely incomprehensible to those of us uninitiated in complex systems theory. But the bottom line was clear enough: global capitalism has made the depletion of resources so rapid, convenient and barrier-free that “earth-human systems” are becoming dangerously unstable in response. When pressed by a journalist for a clear answer on the “are we f**ked” question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, “More or less.”…”
I’ve started to read yet another Stephen King book, and though he keeps me interested with his moderate wit and entertaining plots, I can by now practically predict the course of his stories which seem to always involve small-town Maine, which he seems to include as a tribute to his past but probably secretly despises; a door, usually leading to some time or place else; and the number nineteen, which I personally think he should get over. I haven’t read much about Stephen King himself, and so have no factual backing in what I am here concluding about his character, but as an avid reading for the past several years, I would like to request of Mr. King to please step his game up. Even though, that regardless to whether he does step it up or not, I (and I’m sure many others) will most probably continue to purchase and read his books; for they are, after all, on the higher end of the quality spectrum in the ‘easy reading’ escapist genre, which was the main reason I picked the book up in the first place. I’ve grown quite tired of articles and theoretical analysis of cultural theory, and just happened to have a Stephen King book lying round untouched for the past year. Almost the past year, it was a birthday gift to me last December. And now I shall go continue reading it.
Here is the previously mentioned ‘Life Map’, though not the form previously promised. It’s a badly taken photo because I don’t have a scanner. Also one might notice a discrepancy with the dates on the photo and on the posts, and that is not because I am extremely lazy but because the, space/time continuum is not in fact linear.
This started as a to-do list then spun off into everything, and now that I take a look at it, it might have too many things that none of them will get done.
Some are very specific and some are general and might not make sense (like the abbreviations), so if curosity nudges you, do feel free to ask what the hell am I talking about.
On another note, I saved some old cards from the bottom of my drawer and added them to what has now become the Post-Card Wall (seen below). The big paper on the other wall is an interview with Korean artist collective Part-Time Suite, who are very very cool. I don’t really remember how I came to aquire an A3 print out of this interview, but its an interesting read and you can check them and their work out here: http://www.parttimesuite.org/
More elaborate furnishing plans are comming up.The flat is very very empty (still), I gave away my two plants to a friend of mine yesterday because they needed a better, less preoccupied caretaker than myself, so now I want to fill the space up with stuff, or perhaps lower maintenance plants… like cacti.
Note on “Image Fundamentalists and Image Neoliberals”: I wonder why there cannot be a middle ground, where the context of a work is vital, but does not necessarily have to be grounded in the physical location of the work, And at the same time not have success be measured be selling ability of the work but rather in the degree of relevance it acquires.
Note on “It’s important to remember the accidental audience doesn’t think it’s in the first place. For them, these images are not bad art so much as the epitome of randomness”: why should there be an excuse to be baffled by art? The ‘WTF I don’t even…’ response does not need to be justified; art is essentially useless, if it weren’t, its function won’t make it the epitome and randomness and wouldn’t invoke bafflement.
shinobu wrote on Nov 16:
Yeah, and "you(we) as the theory" is way more convincing and charming!
Batool wrote on Nov 16:
Farid found the theory! hahahaha... you are right though... one has to bump one's own head, basically
shinobu wrote on Nov 14:
You are the theory, Batool, you are. There are no French dudes who could articulate such as good as we go through this ourselves