Selma Feriani Gallery is proud to announce the exhibition Distributed Objects; Maha Malluh in conversation with Arman, César, Daniel Spoerri, Samuel Rousseau and Younes Rahmoun and curated by Marie Deparis-Yafil. The exhibition will revolve around Maha Malluh recent mixed media installations and the dialogue between Malluh’s sculptures, Arman’s accumulation, César’s compression, Spoerri’s ‘snare pictures’, Rousseau’s video installation and Rahmoun’s drawings.

The title Distributed Objects originates from object-oriented computer softwares, like Java language, that represents concepts as ‘objects’, which are designed to work together and with other softwares.

The reasoning behind the thematic for this exhibition comes from Maha Malluh’s perspective as a Saudi Arabian contemporary artist with a global reach, for which she states: ‘Software are like cultures or reigns. And within my culture or country, ‘objects’ have the ability to be ‘distributed’ as they are given the purpose to be allowed to travel great distances for them to communicate with other ‘objects’ from different countries or cultures’.

For many years, Maha Malluh’s body of work has matured both as a critical and a sensible reflection to the immense impact of globalisation on our daily basis life, our behavior and last but not least, our surroundings. Predominantly, her work focuses on the consequences and changes brought forward by consumerism as a new social and economic order and how it radically affects our values, culture as well as natural and architectural landscapes. Nevertheless, rather than expressing a ‘gentle commemoration of a vanishing point’, her vision is that of re-appropriating lost or vanishing heritage; such as history, literacy and popular culture. Her attempts to do so can be witnessed through her re-use of objects that once were of great importance in popular customs and/or people habitudes (i.e. cooking vessels, old bread baking trays, tapes amongst other similar items) Whilst exploring and surveying Saudi Arabia’s souks and flea markets, she reflected on her interest for recycling or re-using objects… ‘When an object can not longer be used for its original purpose, a new function through ‘adaptive re-use’ may be the only chance for it to preserve and communicate the heritage in term of its significance’.

Understandably, as her body of work explores the dialogue between the past and the present (like testimonies of a vanishing world) it seems attractive for her second show at Selma Feriani Gallery to develop this vision by contextualising her work in a new way, therefore presenting it in relation to other contemporary works.

Shown for the first time, Maha’s work ‘Food for Thought - Al-Muallaqat’ explicitly makes reference to the Suspended Odes or Hanging Poems (6th century pre-Islamic Arabic poetry traditionally hung on or in the Kaaba at Mecca) ‘Food for Thought - Al-Muallaqat’ is an installation of old aluminum pots hanging closely together off the wall, pots that have been used by Arabs throughout history for cooking. And with their round visual appearance they formally echo the drawing series ‘Badhra-Zahra’ by the Moroccan artist Younes Rahmoun. Moreover, both the installation and the works on paper share an allegorical dimension relating to the these Odes; Malluh’s work metaphorically expresses their beauty through the significance of the old cooking pots whereas Rahmoun’s drawings transforms each expression of faith within the texts by means of pictorial flowers.

The process of accumulation used during the 60's by the French artist Arman is represented in the exhibition with the piece 'A Bas Les Blattes' (Perspex box containing accumulated Fly-tox hand-pumps) It resounds with Malluh's new version of her cassette installations 'Food for Thought 5000' which subliminally reads ‘Fatawi’ and with 'Food for Thought III'. 'Food for Thought 5000' is an installation of tapes of religious lectures presented within old wooden baking trays -for which all items date from the 1980's- and 'Food for Thought III' is a sculpture composed of Chinco plates welded one on top of another forming a tower that portrays consumerism.

In a different way, these two Maha’s works before mentioned –and also ‘Food for Thought - Al-Muallaqat’- echo with the work by another Nouveau Réaliste; Daniel Spoerri’s The ‘Faux Tableau-Piège’ from the 2010 - 2012 series Mosaiques Années '50 (a 1950’s mosaic table and porcelain assemblage) shown here. A work also serving as an example of Spoerri’s process since the late 50’s; preserving and vertically fixing food waste onto used tableware in order to create an sculptural picture, a piece of art on its own right. For this object he uses a mosaic table as support, and appropriates, like Malluh does, the common objects of a daily past by presenting them as they are without modifying them.

Found in the desert and having survived its harsh conditions, we now find hanging off one of the gallery walls two crushed, rotten yet colorful oil barrels; sitting as a reminder of the main instruments for change of Saudi Arabia’s social structure and its increasing wealth. This installation appropriately titled ‘Oil Candies III’ strongly echoes aesthetically and in significance, César’s 1980’s sculpture ‘Aerosol Bombs Compression’ as a contemporary Eastern alternative to the use of post-industrial ready-mades.

Finally, in the same way that Malluh’s works reflect consumerism as a radical force shaping people values, culture as well as natural and architectural landscapes, Samuel Rousseau’s ‘Domestic Landscape’ evokes the transformation of the every-day landscape as a result of the mechanisms of an industrialised economy. Also, in a similar manner to Maha Malluh’s approach, French artist Samuel Rousseau finds with humor and ‘poetic lucidity’ the means for fighting against the standardised world that modern society has brought upon itself.

With these six artists coming from different lands and ages, Distributed Objects attempts to offer another kind of software, a new reign.

Text by Marie Deparis-Yafil