Calligraphy Square
Part 3 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 12, 5 March - 5 June 2015. Curator: Eungie Joo; Associate Curator: Ryan Inouye. 51 artists and groups.
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Untitled. 2015
(Eau de RRose of Damascus)
Mixed-media installation
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation.
The work draws inspiration from a fourteenth-century model of a rosewater distillery by Al-Mizzi that Tiravanija encountered at the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. With its complex system of hand-blown vials emanating from a pounded brass body, the distillery reminded the artist of Duchamp’s 1914 Bottlerack, and thus the work’s title makes reference to Duchamp’s alter ego, Rrose Selavy, and an assisted ready-made credited to her and Man Ray, the perfume bottle Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (1921).
In addition to commissioning an exact replica of the museum’s model, Tiravanija decided to enhance the object with function. Presenting the object within a frame of activities centred on this function, the work became a rosewater distillery housed within its own source – a rose garden planted in a design based on Arabic motifs. With an outdoor kitchen to which the artist has invited local chefs to prepare and serve rosewater-based concoctions inspired by family recipes from the Levant, the installation becomes a sensorial social experience.
Transforming the gallery that overlooks the garden into a lounge area decorated with Persian carpets and Emirati furnishings, Tiravanija tasked local poets to create original poems about the rose, now calligraphed on the room’s walls.
© Photo: Jamal Shanavas
Courtesy of Sharjah Art Foundation
© Text: SB12 Guidebook
Part 3 of the photo tour of Sharjah Biennial 12, 5 March - 5 June 2015. Curator: Eungie Joo; Associate Curator: Ryan Inouye. 51 artists and groups.