©Abeer Sultan, Photo credit: Top: Grégory Copitet, Bottom: Madhawi Al Gwaiz
A Poem held by a Breath
from Agua Viva series, 2024
قصيدة قبضها النفس
من سلسلة الماء الحيوي
Video Projection on Abalone Shells
4 mins, monochromatic colour, no audio
from Agua Viva series, 2024
قصيدة قبضها النفس
من سلسلة الماء الحيوي
Video Projection on Abalone Shells
4 mins, monochromatic colour, no audio
‘Strange Familiar, Familiar Strange’ POUSH x Intermix, Paris, 2024.
"How does the naked oyster breathe?
If it breathes, I can't see it.
Does what I cannot see not exist?
What moves me the most is that what I cannot see nonetheless exists."
— Clarice Lispector, ‘Agua Viva’
The Red Sea is a vital maritime route connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, shaping migration patterns for communities in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Inspired by this seascape and her family's journey from West Africa to the West Coast of Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, Sultan’s multimedia work ‘Agua Viva’ explores marine life through the imagination of her personal history.
Sultan embodies her fragmented heritage by integrating surplus corals and immortal jellyfish into her visual narrative. Drawing on Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, she reclaims the meaning of blackness through the theory of 'spectacular opacity', which posits that not everything must be revealed as a form of agency. As the theorist Daphne Brooks states, "Opacity is never an absence but is always a present reminder of … the complex body in performance."
In this ongoing series, Sultan uses her body and artist friend Sumayah Fallatah's portraiture to navigate a new cosmography, unveiling hidden geographies and intertwining overlooked histories. Through collages, photographs and moving images featuring jellyfish, corals, and shells, Sultan assembles made-up artefacts and lost data, creating a new mythology for present and future generations of the African diaspora in the Arab Peninsula.
References
If it breathes, I can't see it.
Does what I cannot see not exist?
What moves me the most is that what I cannot see nonetheless exists."
— Clarice Lispector, ‘Agua Viva’
The Red Sea is a vital maritime route connecting Europe, Asia, and Africa, shaping migration patterns for communities in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Inspired by this seascape and her family's journey from West Africa to the West Coast of Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, Sultan’s multimedia work ‘Agua Viva’ explores marine life through the imagination of her personal history.
Sultan embodies her fragmented heritage by integrating surplus corals and immortal jellyfish into her visual narrative. Drawing on Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, she reclaims the meaning of blackness through the theory of 'spectacular opacity', which posits that not everything must be revealed as a form of agency. As the theorist Daphne Brooks states, "Opacity is never an absence but is always a present reminder of … the complex body in performance."
In this ongoing series, Sultan uses her body and artist friend Sumayah Fallatah's portraiture to navigate a new cosmography, unveiling hidden geographies and intertwining overlooked histories. Through collages, photographs and moving images featuring jellyfish, corals, and shells, Sultan assembles made-up artefacts and lost data, creating a new mythology for present and future generations of the African diaspora in the Arab Peninsula.
References
Brooks, D. A. (2006). Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv125jkz8
Césaire, A. (2023). The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition (A. J. Arnold & C. Eshleman,Eds.; A. J. Arnold & C. Eshleman, Trans.). Wesleyan University Press.
Lispector, C. (2012). Água Viva (B. Moser, Ed.; S. Tobler, Trans.). New Directions.