Please join us Sunday evening November 6th as we welcome Ebtisam Abdulaziz for an artist talk and opening reception for her new exhibition at Rhizome. Ebtisam will also present a short video performance, Structures.
WHEN: Sunday November 6, 8:00pm
COST: Free
"I rely on abstracting and experimenting in producing these paintings in which I connect human nature, with all its flaws and shortcomings, with what we are conscious of inside. Through Autobiography- (sketch diary book), I display a collection of papers, painted over a period of time. I am stressing the possibility of subconscious creativity and innovation. Most of my pieces are intimately connected to the human being, his surrounding environment, and the issues that might affect him. It is like an autobiography of the human mind and all the issues and messages it accumulates.
These shapes might also seem to possess a quality similar to growing plants that undergo slow almost undetectable growth over a period of time, despite the fact they are fixed shapes painted with great accuracy and organization, because in fact they do undergo change. As physicist David Bohm, an Einstein fan, said: “Everything that seems constant in the world, audible and tangible, is only an illusion. The reality is that the world is dynamic, infinite in its shapes and colours, and not as it appears. What we see as standard and orderly is the explicate order of things that is explicable and understandable.” The shapes here are precisely prepared by the use of sharp instruments. They also tend to be geometrical rather than random- they are a collection of rectangles, squares and hexagons. They resemble the shapes of the optical illusion movement or Op Art. The elements of this work are geometric artistic expressions that have visual illusions, infinitely expandable and shrinkable. These shapes cannot seem to move or change except through operations that occur in the visual system itself. My ultimate objective here is not just to please the mind, but to also express its desire to explore the imagination and infinite dimensions beyond the limits of the visual. "
Ebtisam Abdulaziz is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and writer. Reflecting her degree in Science & Mathematics, Abdulaziz incorporates her unique perspective on mathematics and the structures of systems to explore issues of identity and culture through installations, performance pieces and works on paper. Her works are evidence of a fascinated with systemic ways to produce emotionally or intellectually meaningful forms of expression. Combining the scientific with the arbitrary, at times juxtaposing the two in order to force the viewer to question their assumptions about rules in the natural and formulaic world, Abdul- Aziz is methodical in her explorations. Her approach functions within the realm of the Gestalt theory and the recognition that understanding something is greater than perceiving the sum of all of its parts. Abdulaziz has exhibited as part of the Inaugural UAE and ADACH Pavilions at 53rd Venice Biennale, as well as at the 7th & 10th Sharjah Biennial; Languages of the Desert, the Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany; Dubai Next, a collaboration between the Dubai Culture & Arts Authority and Vitra Design Museum, Basel 2008; Arab Express, a group exhibition at The Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; 25 years of Arab Creativity, The Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Inventing The World: The Artists as a Citizen, Benin Biennial 2012, Kora Centre, Benin. Ebtisam is one of 100 powerful Arab women of 2013 list.