About the work
Shoman’s first video, 2005’s Of Time and Light seemed also like a caesura in her career. However, it had come after Shoman’s first formal break out of the one dimensional framed canvas and paper in 1993, 1996 and 1995 with a number of installations: rows of black volcanic stone, assemblages of stone, or volcanic rocks installed in front of a large scale Petra painting. In fact, both Of Time and Light and 2006’s I am Everywhere were a return to painting, to her large scale “portraits” of Petra stones and passageways. The resemblance extended from the visual aspect to the apparent thematic (earthly elements, rocks as measure of cyclical time, Petra landscape) and also the effect on the viewers, with –like abstract expressionists’- creation of a virtual environment that overwhelms the viewer’s senses and immerses her/him in an almost spiritual experience. But even to non connoisseurs of her paintings, the two works relate more to still painting than to moving images of cinema and television, with their ultra-slow motion and bold coloring.
These two works ambitiously deal with the basic, universal, central themes of human consciousness and experience - birth, toil, meaning, death, redemption, and resurrection, enveloped in a sort of transcendental humanist spirituality. Indeed, the extraordinarily lush images and ambitious content proceeds from a modern-like démarche, an a-conceptual approach that eschews much of current postmodern video art tropes such as performance, documentation, décalage, pastiche, quotation, etc. the result however is not kitsch, but an impressive coda to a decades long painting career.
The coda was first an ingenious technical accomplishment involving sound and video in a three room installation of seven different video loops, projected simultaneously on nine walls; not counting the outside entrance video loop of a Petra pink/yellow façade. Each room captures the essence of a different phase of human life: milestones from pre-birth to the mortality of loved ones and promise of resurrection. Of Time and Light evokes Viola-esque cycles representing the progress of a soul. However, Shoman eschews the use of actors or special effects to exploit the basic medium of video to the fullest: time, delving visually into the essence of these abstract and timeless questions.
The first dark silent square room with blackened walls has three video loop projections on three walls, showing the surface of the sea at different times of day, mostly during the reds of sunset and sunrise. This is placental pre-birth, a representation of the Quranic “we created from water every living thing”.
The second room’s elongated and narrow shape recalls the span of a human life and allegorizes its experience: two video loops are projected on the four walls. Projected onto the opposing narrow walls at each end is a video of a human figure (Shoman) seen from the back, hiking endlessly on a rocky mountainous trail in the Petra region. The march is filmed at different seasons of the year, underscoring shades of Camus’ Sisyphus. Heightening the sense of toil is the labored breathing filling the room, charted in the projected dark image of a medical graph tracking the breathing’s intensity on the two opposing long walls.
The last room is the room of release and closure: an installation of rocks and two complementary video loops projected on two walls. The first one fills the wider wall and shows the summit of a mountain range in Petra. The slightly dynamic element in this otherwise still image is the slow movement of the clouds on the multicolored rocks, ending with the sun’s rays piercing through and lighting the mountains. The sense of release and redemption is echoed by the flock of birds filmed flying in ever widening circles at dusk against a red sky on the side wall. In this last room is also a physical reminder of Shoman’s previous work: neat rows of small dark rocks lined like worshippers in a mosque, or like tombstones; and facing both the viewer and the mountain projection.
© Excerpt from “Suha Shoman: Screens of Time” by Adila Laïdi-Hanieh. In: Suha Shoman (Amman: The Khalid Shoman Foundation, 2009)
Teil 3 der Fototour durch die Sharjah Biennale 7, 6. April - 6. Juni 2005. Präsidentin & Chef-Direktorin: Hoor Al Qasimi. Kurator: Jack Persekian; Ko-Kuratoren: Ken Lum und Tirdad Zolghadr. 70 Beteiligte.