The Kingdom of Bahrain’s first-time Venice pavilion,
“In A World Of Your Own,” after two very successful participations in the Architecture
Biennale, brings together the trio of Mariam Haji, Waheeda Mallulah, and
Camille Zakharia, two Bahraini women and a Lebanese artist, presenting works
spanning across photography, collage and drawing.
The exhibition is conceived as an environment, through
which the artists unmake national identities at a time when the Gulf is
experiencing the rise of post-colonial nationalisms and identity politics. Responding to
current geo-political enfranchisement, Bahrain disestablishes
normative identity through a series of interventions questioning the boundaries
of social norms, the role of women and the place of historical memory. More
than a national pavilion, it is an experiment in understanding the role of
images in configuring reality.
Bahrain is a new
comer into the world of contemporary art, in spite of a long tradition of abstract
and expressionist painting and sculpture. The postmodern scenario of
gentrification, overpopulation, labor migration and hyper-spaces is played out
in Bahrain, in such a way that art reflects the difficulties that Bahrain
encounters when addressing “tradition”. The pavilion asks poignant questions
about the nature of space – in terms of memory and experience – and how all
these contemporary phenomena distinctively shape the living space of Bahrain.
Cultural and political structures become obviously
altered in the process and that is how they appear in the exhibition as
disembodied selves, personal experiences bordering on alienation and
discontinuity. It is still not entirely clear to which extent this concept
represents the current state of visual arts in Bahrain but can be seen also as
trend-setting and encouraging. But a central question remains: What is national
identity in a country so beset by constant physical and social change? Is it
even necessary?
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